Coronado

There's a gentle, almost naive quality to the guitar line that opens this track — clean and unhurried, carrying a sweetness that feels slightly out of time, like something from a decade the song wasn't actually made in. The rhythm is loose without being sloppy, and the overall production has a warm, sun-faded quality as if the tape itself has been left in a car on a summer afternoon. Emotionally it operates in a minor key beneath its sunny surface — Cox sings about the California of imagination rather than fact, the American West as a psychological state rather than a geography. There's longing here, but it's the wistful kind rather than the aching kind, a reaching toward an idea of freedom and open space that the song knows is probably myth. Vocally he's more tender here than on Deerhunter's more abrasive work, the delivery unguarded in a way that disarms. It belongs to that strand of Halcyon Digest that was consciously processing American rock mythology through a lens of distance and affectionate skepticism. This is for late-afternoon light in a car with the windows down, for the particular feeling of being between places and not minding.