Mislead Into A Field By A Deformed Deer

This will take some figuring out, but it's worth it.

     

The only reason I know about this band is because Alex Graham (one of the members) was actually an animation teacher of mine with whom I'd often talk music and who ended up mentioning his band. It was only after I completed his class, however, that I decided to take a listen to his album. Now, I was quite willing to allow myself to like his music, despite its not being the sort of thing I typically go for (because, you know, I WANT to be able to like the stuff that people I know create), and he frequently denounced its quality, and this made me even more interested in proving him wrong.

Now, I got the album and I listened to it. It's not, as I said, the sort of thing I typically listen to, and I think this was the reason I didn't initially like it. Well, it's not so much that I didn't like it as it was I just couldn't get into it. I listened to it a couple times, then didn't take another listen for about half a year.

Then, one afternoon, while wasting time on the internet, I decided to listen to Mislead Into A Field By A Deformed Deer again, this time through different headphones than I had listened to it through before. This may sound really weird, but it actually sounded better because the headphones were made differently. Furthermore, I had discovered the right activity for listening to the Tulips - doing nothing in particular. You probably know what I mean when I say that there are different albums for different activities - relaxing, reading, drinking tea, making pipe-cleaner dolls, wasting time on the internet - and I'd finally found this one's niche.

That said, let me describe what it actually sounds like. During the time that I knew him, I was very familiar with Mr. Graham's taste in music, which could be described as psychedelic. He often played it in class. Mislead Into A Field By A Deformed Deer is QUITE psychedelic. It sounds like a conglomeration of bands we talked about - the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Olivia Tremor Control - but from a different universe.

It's a universe that you've suddenly found yourself in, although you're not surprised by it. Some of the things you see there are familiar - you can make out three-dimensional shapes and life forms you identify as life. It's not a frightening or unfriendly world by any chance. Still, you're not going to be able to get back home - wait, could this be the afterlife? Have you died and not remembered it? - and that's not a miserable fact, but you DO spend quite a while feeling melancholic about it until you decide that, no matter how you feel, you should just try to move on and do the best in this world that you can.

I have a feeling that I can tell where these musicians may take their music from here, making sonic descriptions of strange-yet-not-strange foreign worlds, and, now that I've figured out how to fully appreciate it, I will certainly be interested in hearing their future works.