Deerhoof - The Magic
Drowned In Sound 90
Deerhoof are a bunch of eccentric rock’n’rollers who know as well as you or I that neurosis is the flavour of the day. The sure-footedness of domineering/profiteering Top-40s radio is responsible. Outside the unconstrained nucleus of the music industry, what can a poor boy wanna do but freak ‘em all out? The Magic, Deerhoof’s splendid new record, is fraught with neurotic tumult. The songs are founded on Deerhoof’s now familiar virtuosic instrumentalism: they operate at high energy, and they take countless sharp turns. It should come as little surprise, too, that 16 albums in, their newest is perhaps the most purely fun to listen to.
What is surprising is that the sounds of the music industry nucleus are surprisingly well-represented. Take 'Kafe Mania', track two. For the first 25 seconds it could be a Black Keys song. Then the vocals come in — whimsical, largely indecipherable — and then there’s a synth in the interlude that reminds you about darkness. But for a second there, it sounded straight-up, almost radio-ready. That midtempo chug. Which, in fact, recurs quite a bit: 'Criminals of the Dream'. 'Learning to Apologize Effectively', and 'Plastic Thrills', all use it.
Or take 'Life is Suffering', track four. It starts out straight funk. A percussive stutter, then a real gritty, gutty bassline, that you realise is in a slightly off-kilter signature, and then that howling lead guitar, and then another strange vocal line, and you’re back in Deerhoof territory. The chorus marks the arrival of a different sound — not lightyears away, but a bit more Motown than Funkadelic. 'Model Behavior' has that same sense, the way it morphs a funk groove into some kind of psych-jazz. From funk to Deerhoof to Motown and back, and then elsewhere.
'Criminals of the Dream' may be the most distinct in this blending of sonic characters. The first 45 seconds sound like a rewrite of the Twin Peaks theme, self-consciously sappy synth, before the song reasserts itself in that steady-chugging Stones territory. Then singer Satomi Matsuzaki tells us: “It’s not right if everyone fights to dream at night…wondering where the magic hides.” Suggesting, I think, that everyone ought to have equal access to ‘the magic,’ which is there all around them, always, and that it gets obscured by infighting. Which speaks to the underlying optimism in the otherwise nihilistic-seeming lyrics. It’s important to remember that the first sound of the album is Matsuzaki speak-singing “The magic”, as if to say that everything that follows is indeed the magic that people fight to recognise. Perhaps the more accurately punctuated quotation would be, “The magic:”.
I think of Deerhoof as a band inexorably concerned with disorienting their listeners, the mission of which is to say that they’re not satisfied to give you cheap, predictable thrills. And, also, that you shouldn’t be satisfied to receive them. The Magic doesn’t abandon this mission, but it pushes it a little further toward the backburner. There’s a steady flow between pastiche and original voice. It’s sometimes abrupt, sometimes not, and always punctuated by distinct Deerhoof moves — polyrhythm, flexible keys, and lyrics whose tone you can never quite pin down. The instrumental skill that Deerhoof loyalists have come to love abounds, and front and centre is a resounding, absurdist joy.
Tue Jun 28 15:08:24 GMT 2016Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Deerhoof
The Magic
[Polyvinyl; 2016]
Rating: 4/5
My magic moment for Deerhoof — the moment I realized the band could do whatever they wanted and make it sound amazing — comes at the end of The Runners Four, about halfway into “Rrrrrrright.” The song starts up like a ragged motorbike, and you think it’s going to be another charged, satisfying Kraut-y thing that indie bands do from time to time. But no, the song throws you for a loop, because the beat gets too off-kilter and proggy, kind of mean but kind of happy too, and you can’t quite tell where it’s headed, even while trying to anticipate every next move. Then it stops, suddenly, until it starts squawking like a dying chicken.
“Rrrrrrright” is one of the first songs I had heard from the band, and when I first experienced that jolt of silence, I was… perplexed, if not annoyed. But was this a present for me? Oddly, the nothing here started to become kind of something, and I actually began enjoying it. Now? I can’t wait for that punk silence. Why do I still remember those chicken sounds? What was I hearing there and why is it now, in retrospect, so much more satisfying and intense and musical and magical than anything I could had predicted?
The Magic is Deerhoof’s 13th full-length album, and it’s one of their most well-rounded, sweeter offerings, perhaps a companion to Friend Opportunity or Offend Maggie in size and spirit. It’s also the best for right now, in our current context, with diverse influences blended to transcend homage, a rejuvenated splash of punk cheer in a year of focused albums and single ideas. It might be a teachable moment.
The press for The Magic has this curious bit about how the band is drawing from music they liked “when they were kids” on this record, cutting loose their arty pretensions and taking influences from hair metal and doo-wop and hip-hop and so on — many many genres. But to be honest, I kind of figured this was already happening with Deerhoof, wasn’t it? The band is irreverent and avant-garde, surely, but it’s always been in a way that reflected critically on their surroundings while remaining deeply affectionate to their forebears. They never seemed intentionally disruptive so much as permanently convinced that better sounds lay in oft-tread musical paths; the band just needed a good shake-up to find them.
Songs like “Learning To Apologize Effectively,” “Plastic Thrills,” and “Little Hollywood” are all perfect examples of Deerhoof’s finesse in making the cut, just barely landing in a sweet spot of cute misdirection and mean mighty rock, with “Little Hollywood” landing with the crisper, more mature feel of Breakup Song and “Thrills” splitting the difference between a hundred overexposed garage riffs. Meanwhile, “Kafe Mania,” “Life Is Suffering,” and “Criminals of the Dream” bear similar signposts from past albums, especially the bass-y, dense rhythm sections. But each song hits a development point around the halfway mark — a new countermelody, a dissonant blast, Greg Saunier playing like Animal — that makes things considerably more interesting.
“Kafe” puts call-and-response and harmonizing guitars up to its nonsense lyrics (there are a lot of coffee drink names), treating its one-note idea with splendid sincerity until it feels 10 times the song it once was. “Suffering” breaks the tension of the opening groove, which is rigidly anti-funky, with a kind of stoned soft-rock chorus (“Life is suffering, man/ Higher and higher and higher!”), softening it with a salve like two buddies having a tough conversation about life. And “Dreamers” becomes a wondrous little centerpiece, one of the defining Deerhoof songs if I’ve heard one, elevating one nice idea (“It’s okay to dream at night”) into a lovely missive of self-celebration amidst sympathetic synths and soulful guitars.
There are a few lesser moments on the second half of the album, like the stilted flow of “Debut” or “Acceptance Speech,” yet they still have hooks worth revisiting. The only clear misstep I spot on the record would have to be “Dispossessor,” a Satomi-less solo turn for John Dieterich that dips a little too deep into the garage-rock revival well and can’t be pulled out by her usually omnipresent, buoying voice. While “That Ain’t No Life To Me” is another rare Satomi-free spot, it feels more innately Deerhoofian than “Dispossessor” by its slapdash arrangement: half happy, half angry, with straightforwardly punk lyrics from Ed Rodriguez and a stuttering, surprising end.
The loose ends — a genuine James Brown tribute that works (“Model Behavior”), a flighty half cover of two verses from that Ink Spots song from Fallout 3 (“I’ve lost all ambition for worldly acclaim/ I just want to be the one you love”), Satomi’s hum (“Pastrache Come Back”) — are all magical in their own private ways, taking up space on an album’s scope but feeling infinite in the little seconds they have to perform for us. Even in those moments, I hear the magic. I listen to Satomi plucking a bass and humming to herself softly, and I can hear dimensions spreading out, songs setting up, new joys to be discovered in the spare notes. These songs all demonstrate a musical identity that’s not swayed by the wide swath of influences it consumes, but rather defined in relief, by the constant attempts to smash these influences together to find something new in their connections, a variegated mix whose end goal is to produce new colors. The magic is how Deerhoof goes further in and only branches farther out.
Pitchfork 69
It’s hard to pinpoint what “consistency” means in the context of a restless band like Deerhoof, who have spent the past 20 years crafting record after record of experimental rock music—each sounding distinct from one another but also sounding unmistakably like Deerhoof. While it’s true a single moment of their inscrutable avant-pop can sometimes recall other artists—a garage-y guitar riff, a Stereolab-y keyboard part, a Fugazi drum roll—each Deerhoof record (or even song) mashes all of these things together in a way that feels completely exclusive to them.
It should be no surprise then that The Magic stands out from the rest of their output while still being “another Deerhoof record.” Like on 2014’s La Isla Bonita and 2011’s Vs. Evil, this new album shows the band continuing their recent trend toward music that is ever-so-slightly more accessible. But unlike on those records, which each featured plenty of synths and a number of soft spotlight pop moments, The Magic—recorded in seven days in an abandoned office in a New Mexico desert—is one of their loosest and most rock-influenced records yet, with the guitars placed front and center.
Beginning with a ripping riff and galloping drums worthy of the White Stripes, the “bring the rock” mentality is made clear from the album’s opening moments on “The Devil And His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue” (a title apparently taken from a section of Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise describing Stalinist opera). A few of the album’s tracks go even further, all the way to traditional-rock-song territory. “That Ain’t No Life to Me,” sung by guitarist Ed Rodriguez, pumps out no-frills garage-grunge, complete with simple, allusion-free lyrics. “Dispossessor” is a bit more interesting, channeling ’70s arena guitar into a less sexy Cobra Verde. And “Plastic Thrills” features a lip-snarling guitar line, woo-woo backing vocals, and even handclaps. These three tracks are so unexpectedly straightforward that it’s almost hard to believe that it’s Deerhoof.
It’s no coincidence that all three feature male lead vocals in place of main vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki’s typical dreamy sing-speak chants, perhaps the band’s biggest distinguishing factor. While the male voices of Rodriguez and drummer Greg Saunier help fill out Deerhoof’s sound palette, particularly on harmonies, it’s Satomi’s voice that consistently makes Deerhoof sound both cool and weird. It works like an instrument in the same way that out-of-place vocalist Damo Suzuki’s yelps worked on Can’s classic run; in either case, going with a traditional white male rock voice would have dumbed down the musical output. The Magic’s rock’n’roll feel extends throughout the record, but Satomi thankfully leads the way. Both “Model Behavior” and “Debut” are deliciously funky, with the latter sounding almost like a Satomi-fronted take on Bowie’s Station to Station. And “Kafe Mania!” blends bursting guitars with the Deerhoof mainstay technique of Satomi singing a mirrored melody of an accompanying keyboard line to great effect.
The Magic’s true highlight though is “Criminals of the Dream,” a five minute epic that begins with a dreamy synth intro that sounds like it could play over a scene of Atreyu and Falcor in The Neverending Story, before a kraut guitar and Satomi’s vocals kick in. After a long build-up, the song finally climaxes with a minute of one of the most gorgeous melodies Deerhoof has ever put to record. The circling chords and refrain of “I know you can dream things aren't as bad as they seem” makes you wish the song would just go on forever, even though you know it won’t.
As rock-leaning as it may be, The Magic is no less an acquired taste than most of the other records Deerhoof have put out. The strange vocals and constant, hyperactive changes in pace will never be for everyone, and the overall bursting-at-the-seams-ness can even impart a feeling of exhaustion in a listener. Within the context of Deerhoof’s oeuvre, The Magic is a bit of a back-to-the-garage reset that doesn’t approach the heights of career apexes Friend Opportunity and Runners Four, but offers a fresh energy that rewards the converted.
Wed Jun 29 05:00:00 GMT 2016The Guardian 60
(Upset the Rhythm)
Deerhoof have been wreaking merry havoc on record for almost 20 years and show no signs of mellowing here. Fifteen tracks flash by in just over 40 minutes, and you emerge feeling both energised and slightly baffled by their erratic artpop. There’s plenty to explain why the band remain a cult concern: singer Satomi Matsuzaki’s naive vocals and lyrics can be grating, and not everyone is drawn to songs entitled The Devil and His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue. But even for non-devotees, this is a less challenging listen than might be expected. There’s an abundance of hooks and twisted melodies buried within its pile-up of ideas. And for every aimless doodle (Patrasche Come Back), there’s a taut garagey thrash (Dispossesor).
Continue reading... Sun Jun 26 06:59:07 GMT 2016