A lot of great music exists out there. But NBN can’t devote a slot to every CD that hits shelves, especially for bands most of you have never heard of. So, that’s where we come in. Due to our indie-leanings here at One-Click Wonders, we catch all the music too obscure for the main page, and offer up a quick take on it. Today, we absorb Atlas Sound’s Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel.

In a December blog post on the official Deerhunter blog, the band’s lead singer Bradford Cox talks about how he wants to create “therapeutic” music that could “really help someone or some people.” Knowing this helps explains Cox’s first full-length solo album, under the name Atlas Sound, Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel. His first solo venture away from the comfort of Deerhunter yields a hypnotic, creepy-but-comforting pop-drenched-in-60’s-doo-wop record, proof that Cox may be one of the brightest musicians in the business today.

Even though Cox’s pain and misery dot Deerhunter’s excellent 2007 album Cryptograms, Atlas Sound’s debut stands as a truly one-man effort, all parts played by Cox. The dominant themes remain the same: sadness, longing, nostalgia, disease and damaged flesh. But unlike Cryptograms, which swathed these feeling in either terrifying nightmares of noise or dreamy pop-songs, Atlas Sound instead surrounds them in hazy electronics and distant guitar notes, more pleasant but loaded with bad vibrations. “Recent Bedroom” brings together bells, drums and guitars to create a misty lullaby finidng Cox lamenting the loss of innocence, wondering why he can’t cry at the death of a family member. “I don’t know, I don’t know why,” he wails, his voice breaking through the mix to deliver the emotional impact home. Elsewhere, “River Card” floats by using gentle pop structure akin to early Grizzly Bear, while “Ativan” sounds even older, entrenched in 60’s psychedelia. Most of the songs on the album, even when smothered in electronic flourishes and bells, retain basic pop structure, a showcase for Cox’s love of old pop songs and groups like The Everly Brothers. It sounds strangely alien but also extremely familiar.

The album’s highlights sound the most comfortable. “Quarantined,” a fever dream of a song about AIDS patients, sounds closed-in and intimate, and even flirts with a dance groove before dissolving into an outro appropriate for a late night spent alone. The sparse, vocally-distored “On Guard” and the quietly glowing “Bite Marks” also stick out as small-room standouts. Atlas Sound’s first album is personal therapy set to CD, an individual letting out his feelings using only a few instruments and computer programs to create something offering help for himself, and trying to connect with the pain of others. This album, much like Deerhunter’s 2007 output, is sure to put off a lot with its dark imagery and simple pop set-ups, but others will be gripped into Atlas Sound’s intimately sad sonic landscape, a place where pain can be expressed and healed via creation. At the very least, props to Bradford Cox, who has been involved in another excellent album in a year’s time, and is starting to resemble of the more fascinating minds in the current music world.

Bonus video of “River Card”