Bradford Cox is the internet age’s coming of Howard Stern and James Murphy all at once. However, given that Howard Stern’s running title was “king of all media” and the specification of Internet for Deerhunter/Atlas Sound’s front-genius Brad is imposing a limitation, and given that verysame limitation basically puts him in the court Murphy slam dunks within 24/7,  I daresay I just killed my own thesis two sentences deep.

Let’s try this again: Bradford Cox probably has one of the most fucked-up ipod playlists of any current, new young american primitive music tastemaker.  Fittingly, it would seem that Brad’s tastes, at least those which he’s willing to give lip-service to, skew towards the new, the young, and the primative (not necessarily always American).

To wit: seemingly ages ago, when the world was young and blogs were new, Brad mentioned listening to a relatively unknown Brooklyn band, actually a boy/girl duo, called High Places.  This was at the height of Deerhunter’s fresh-from-Atlanta, blowjobbin’, dressin’-in-dressesn’ infamy, and, as such, streets was watchin’. The two very, very hard to come by High Places EPs suddenly became hot items, and the duo put the collected tracks, along with a few odds and sods, onto eMusic.

That’s where I come in.

Having been worn down, in terms of resistance to the sheer looped fuckadelic beauty of freakfolk, by Panda Bear’s 2007 techstasy masterpiece Person Pitch, I was already vulnerable to the venn diagram overlap of hippie shit and rave blow-up that the likes of Animal Collective were jamming, literally and figuratively, into day-glo light sockets. As such, the tiki beachfreak My Bloody ValenDude sound of High Places hit a weird spot with me-there’s no way in hell I could relate on anything other than a totally gutteral level, but my brain was blown by the loops upon loops upon loops, sounding like my utter fantasy of echoing an echo on top of an echo and stuttering a grain filter or some decay slightly underneath until the whole damn thing exploded like a purple sunset bleeding.

That purple sunset bleeding into an afternoon delight is High Places.

Their sound is nothing more and nothing less than calypsfreak, the fuckup stoner alternative to the corsets and Stephenie Meyer fat girl sounds of Crystal Castles, but I tend to believe in High Places a little bit more. They have more sincerity, for one. Secondly, they do what they do when they do it, a wide-eyed totally earnest loop-de-loop’d electronic beach bird sound of children and machines, and they do it and they do it well and, fuck yes, they go into Ableton and attach an slight three second echo to the two second echo and as such they warp your brain in a way that almost makes you think Jack Johnson’s banana pancakes are tools of the MFing devil. These kids may surf, but if they do it’s only waves of serotonin.

High Places: Visions The First

Welcome to High Places-where the calypso influence of the second Knife record meets a low-fi production sensibility and the sweetest, most indecipherable vocals you’ve ever heard. This is almost saccharine and, around 2:10 with the keys becoming some sort of organ/sitar hybrid, almost deadly. Also, listen to the way under-produced bass thump-what you have here is indie calypso hop. And then the steel drums echo all around the shelf.

High Places: The Tree With The Lights In It

The lyrics “don’t try to fight it” come to prominence in this song, until what sounds like steel bongos and a definite, ghastly off-key (but still beautiful)  and haunted coo end the song.

 High Places: The Modern Things (Bjork Cover)

I have to imagine that Mizz Bjork utterly adores this, because it’s so barefoot-beach-in-the-gale-force-rain static stuttered that it’s simultaneously unlistenable and childlike-gorgeous.

High Places are a band you can’t be apathetic towards. Either you love them or you hate them…and, today, they’re beating in my blood. You can argue everything they do sounds the same. I can argue I love that sound. And I do.

High Places myspace