Atlas Sound
Logos - Kranky
FILTER Grade: 86%

On last year’s Microcastles, Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox stepped out of the bedroom and flexed some serious guitar-pop muscles, transforming that group’s wall-of-feedback aesthetic into rock music as dreamy and poppy as it was powerful. On Logos, Cox’s solo follow-up to 2008’s Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel, he again finds the middle-ground between computer-glut experimentation and pop melody, landing somewhere between Let the Blind’s sheetgaze and Microcastle’s stage-readiness.  When he’s on—which, on Logos, he often is—Cox is a master of melody, blending disparate elements into a whole that is both disarming and insanely catchy, the sounds coming together like digital wind chimes in a quiet hurricane on “Washington School.”  And though he occasionally buries his vocals under distortion, Cox is undeniably the star of the show, clutching a golden microphone while his wisps of bangs hide his eyes from  stage lights.