Deerhunter show

Bradford Cox and his Jazzmaster

i saw Deerhunter last night at the canal club.  it was really great, Ducktails (lead singer of real estate) opened with a hazy, lazy guitar/drum machine set full of nodding rhythms and loops. i feel he could have played a little longer though - his set only lasted about twenty minutes.  Casino vs. Japan was next, playing sleepy, heavy bodied electronic ambient.
Deerhunter played a lot of their new songs, with a few of the old ones. Halcyon Digest, their newest album, is growing on me.  i feel it's significantly happier sounding than their previous releases, which was kind of hard to get used to at first.  hearing the songs played live really made me appreciate the album much more, however.  especially with "Helicopter" (i think that's the title of the song), which they extended for the show.  they also extended "Nothing Ever Happened," adding a crazed experimental guitar solo from Cox, reminiscent of late 80's/early 90's post punk and college rock.  they came back on for an encore and played a variation of "Cryptograms," with their amps turned as loud as they would go...i was standing beside Cox's stack and i still can't hear out of my left ear.  they threw lots of extra energy into an already energetic song, giving it a saturated, obnoxiously loud punk rock feel to make something new yet nostalgic for the fans of their older work.
Deerhunter is one band that really sound like the sources they claim to be influenced by.  i read in an interview recently that Bradford Cox (lead singer/guitarist) pulls a lot of his musical inspiration from spending his entire sixteenth year in a coma.  he was pumped full of morphine and various other narcotic painkillers.  the combination of those two feelings...being lost in sleep and a morphine-induced dreamlike consciousness really come out in Deerhunter's music.  repeating rhythms, wailing guitars, reverb, all tightly wound together and seeming to be coming from the bottom of a dark lake than from your stereo speakers.   Cox was diagnosed at a young age with Marfan Syndrome, a disease of the connective tissue which leaves the sufferer abnormally skinny with extended arms/legs.  it also affects eyesight and many other parts of the body.  due to his disease, he was alienated from other kids, spending a lot of time separated from other people.  this influenced his musical ideas greatly as well, especially with the songs "Hazel St." and "Twilight on Carbon Lake."  Cox's musical influences include the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Stereolab.