Bradford Cox of Atlas Sound

Last Thursday’s performance at NYU’s E & L Auditorium was the first for Neon Indian since relocating to Brooklyn from Austin, Texas, and while the band played an exceptionally tight set, their particular brand of psychedelic electro-pop come off as flat, generic, and, tasteless. To the unfamiliar these songs don’t carry enough dynamic to remain interesting, and in this particular setting—one without booze, disco balls or dance floors—being forced to passively listen became a chore, though the band is not entirely to blame for this. Their most accomplished songs, many from last year’s Psychic Chasms (“Deadbeat Summer”, “I Should Have Taken Acid With You”), conjured the most elicit responses from an otherwise lifeless audience, many of whom were students either too scared to move or too cool to shake a leg. Neon Indian make music better suited for the dance floor, and it’s not hard to imagine them making a more compelling connection with their audience if they performed, say, at a club rather than a cramped auditorium on the fourth floor of a dorm hall.

But I couldn’t imagine a more fitting environment to experience Atlas Sound’s Paxil-fueled rants and musings. The thing about lead singer Bradford Cox is that he only seems to get better: Every record he’s released since Cryptograms with Deerhunter finds him building and reframing the dark and introverted lyrical themes he’s been exploring over the course of his short career within increasingly sophisticated arrangements. His appreciation of his peers is well-noted and he has a knack for emulating his heroes without forfeiting his increasingly unique viewpoint. Last year’s Logos is an infectious, moody work that continues to explore the discordant themes of his debut Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, only this time around Cox is more focused, experimental, and—perhaps most surprisingly—even somewhat positive. It’s no surprise that the best song off Logos is the one that sounds the least like Cox’s previous efforts—“Walkabout” features Panda Bear and succeeds by effectively bringing Cox out of his comfort zone and into sincere, outward-looking pop territory, building a gleaming melody over a riff sampled from The Dovers’ 1963 single “What Am I Going To Do?”. Performing alone, the stark setup worked to his benefit, particularly on songs like “Criminals” and “Untitled”, as it made clear that under all the dense album production lie economical and meticulously-crafted pop songs. However, Cox still has one foot heavily cemented in the experimental side of things, and he spent a good deal of the evening using a simple loop station to construct complex sound collages and rhythms, in turn creating an eerily transcendental environment that was difficult not to get lost in. By the end of the evening most members of the audience looked as if they’d spent the last six hours drinking NyQuill and staring directly into the sun. Which, in the world of Atlas Sound, is most definitely a good thing.