Video: Deerhunter: "Hazel St." (Live at the Pitchfork Music Festival)
In our last look at video from this year's Pitchfork Music Festival, we saw a pair of clips from Battles, and now we return with Deerhunter. Near the end of the band's Cryptograms is "Hazel St.", an uptempo song that frontman Bradford Cox has described as a "fantasy about being normal." Awash in reverbed vocal effects, the song's summery space-rock thrum goes will with the outdoors and hot afternoons. When Deerhunter performed "Hazel St." at the festival this summer, Cox might've had enough of summer heat. "First of all, the stage was like 250 degrees," Cox told Pitchfork afterward. And the stage was black. And Cox was barefoot. Didn't seem to hurt the performance much, though. Cox still cuts a striking figure, whether in a dress or in his more recent move back to "normal" men's clothing, and here the rest of the band makes sure the song sounds great for either nodding your head or losing it. (Thanks again to Optimus for making this video possible.)
[original track from Cryptograms; out now on Kranky]