Deerhoof Photo: Joe Singh
Nick Bollinger revels in the anarchic surrealism of Amer-indie veterans Deerhoof.
When it comes to bands doing it independently, Deerhoof have been ploughing their own furrow for more than two decades - and that furrow hasn’t got any straighter.
The Magic is Deerhoof’s fourteenth album and finds them as wilfully eclectic as ever. In just the opening song they crash from rockabilly rhythm into oriental melody, with the occasional jazz change and a bit of Hawaiian guitar thrown on top. They call the track ‘The Devil and His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue’, but that could just as easily be a description of the band itself.
Formed in San Francisco 22 years ago, their mainstays have been drummer/vocalist Greg Saunier, guitarist John Dietrich and bass player and vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki, who had never played in a band before, just sung a little karaoke, and had only arrived in America from her native Japan a week before she joined Deerhoof in 1995. Her naïve yet surprisingly pop-wise style has been one of the group’s chief assets, and has neither lost its innocence nor its charm.
Though their songs can be disarmingly simple, Deerhoof have no deficiencies in the chops area. Drummer Greg Saunier in particular is a fantastic musician, and the groove he plays on ‘Model Behaviour’ lays the foundations for what resembles a psychedelic James Brown.
Yet equally impressive is the way these accomplished musicians preserve the raw punk spirit they started out with. Saunier has talked about the group consciously trying not to progress from one record to the next, but rather tearing itself down and starting from scratch with each new project - though he’s also said that the original plan for their last album, La Isla Bonita was to bring in an outside producer and go for a slick 80s dance sound, in keeping with the album’s title, which was borrowed from a Madonna song. They were making demos in preparation for the big disco treatment when they decided they rather liked the demos the way they were, so that became the album instead. The final results sounded nothing like Madonna - and nor for that matter does this.
That’s a wobbly cover of an old Ink Spots tune, which seems to hark back to Matsuzaki’s origins as a karaoke singer. At other times, Deerhoof show that if they wanted to they could probably write a pop classic themselves, though as always it would seem to be entirely on their own terms. ‘Acceptance Speech’ might be Deerhoof’s take on big 80s FM pop – rendered, naturally through a scratchy transistor radio – while the riffs of ‘Kafe Mania’ suggest their version of hair metal.
They may deliberately avoid progression, still Deerhoof have made an album as full of mad energy, grungy rock, pop fun, and wild exotica as any they have ever done. To record it, they convened for a week in an abandoned office space in the New Mexico desert. They went there, the said, looking for the magic. And they found it.
Songs featured: The Devil and His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue, Criminals of the Dream, Model Behaviour, That Ain’t No Life For Me, Acceptance Speech, Kafe Mania, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire.
The Magic is available on Polyvinyl Records.
