Monomania (4AD)

To the surprise of no one, prolific Atlanta indie-pop savant Bradford Cox and the rest of Deerhunter sifted through a ton of material before arriving at their sixth full-length LP, Monomania. After apparently racking up 250 new tunes before hitting the studio, though, the outfit mercilessly trimmed the fat to deliver a tidy dozen songs as mesmerizing as anything in Cox’s mind-bogglingly consistent catalogue.

While altogether a more rocking outing than Deerhunter’s 2010 set Halcyon Digest, the LP begins with “Neon Junkyard”, a maple-syrup-thick soundscape full of acoustic guitars, backmasked melodies and, apparently, a fog machine. “Leather Jacket II” ratchets up the rock ’n’ roll raunchiness, however, with tape-deteriorating manipulations and a menacing, string-bending motif screaming out of the speakers just beneath Cox’s slyly sung lines about the long-suffering “Queen of Bass”.

The singer-guitarist also talks heartache and escape on the jaunty lo-fi jamboree “Pensacola”, where, backed by dirt-caked licks and a CCR-simple one-two drum shuffle, he flees his lady’s cheatin’ heart. Elsewhere, second-in-command Lockett Pundt delivers a post–Strokes garage-pop stunner with his melancholy “The Missing”.

Drafty, echo-slathered highlight “Punk (La Vie Antérieure)” concludes the set with Cox tipping his hat to a Charles Baudelaire poem, sighing wistfully of his own previous life: “For a year, I was queer/I had conquered all my fears/Not alone anymore/But I found it such a bore.” As the psychiatrically indebted album title hints at, it’s a partial peek into Cox’s madness, as well as that of Deerhunter’s. But don’t worry, there’s still at least another couple of hundred tracks hanging around somewhere to explain the rest of the story .