Deerhunter Tone It Down at CMJ ... Sorta

Posted on Oct 18th 2007 7:00PM by Kim Davis
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"Thanks to the unmatchable Dan Deacon!" Bradford Cox said as he and his rock quintet took to the stage at Bowery Ballroom Wednesday night for their CMJ showcase. The sinewy Deerhunter frontman would go on to make shout outs to his CMJ predecessor throughout the night, and at one point he even accused the audience of being more interested in the electronic performance art stylings of Deacon than his own band's psychedelic offering. "You want Dan, don't you?!" he taunted, half kidding, as the show neared its end, and a number of badge-holding scenesters started heading out.

Oddly, however, this was one of the only pre-encore outbursts from the usually very verbose, very bizarre singer, whose on-stage antics -- ranging from donning ladies' dresses and spurting fake blood from his mouth, to receiving fellatio (yes) from his bandmates and airing the band's personal life on the Internet via their blog -- have attracted both positive and negative attention from the media and members of the band.

In fact, guitarist Colin Mee got so fed up with the buzz their Atlanta band was getting independent from their music that he quit in August, telling Pitchfork, "We were receiving (and creating) too much press that had nothing to do with any new music being created. I don't want to be overexposed. I don't want the world to know what our excrement looks like or what we are selling on eBay or whether we got robbed ... I found it disgraceful and sensationalistic." He went on to say that he thought Deerhunter were being "portrayed as opportunists." So is this why Cox looked like a prep on his way to a crew match after English Lit. last night? Perhaps.

Dressed in jeans and a pink button down shirt, Cox was cordial and mild-mannered throughout the band's noisy, stunning performance -- Joshua Fauver's bass playing and perpetual "I'm having more fun than all of you" smirk is truly a treat to watch -- and even gave the demur Mee, who's been playing with the band again, the first acknowledgment. Overkill? Maybe, but hey, they have a principle player back, don't they?

Unsurprisingly, however, to anyone who's seen Deerhunter in the past year, the "Bradford Cox sanity show" didn't last. After the band exited the stage, he returned, wasted, to inform the audience that he had "threatened his band" into playing more songs and launched into one of his typically shrink-like sermons with "I miss my family." And after wrestling with the idea that he couldn't smoke on stage ("What's wrong with this city?!" "Cat Power can smoke on stage!"), he lit up and mumbled something about "floating on an existential dark cloud" and desiring a "DIY community where they reject you," before drummer Moses Archuleta cued the house DJ and escorted his disoriented frontman off the stage.