Sunday, December 14, 2008

Deerhoof

Listening to Deerhoof, San Francisco’s wonderfully manic noise-pop trio, you often get the feeling you’re playing with a child’s toy, one that is all sweetness and smiles, and then, all of a sudden, sprouts a new head.

Too damaged for MTV, too immediate to be anything but a pop band, Deerhoof’s gift for forging a seemingly limitless number of hooks from strange alchemies — twee and violence, space and chaos — has made them one of the most unlikely success stories in independent music, picking up glowing NY Times reviews and Radiohead supports like so much flotsam, all a pretty remarkable trajectory for possibly the least calculating band in independent music.

‘Deerhoof is just our band name,’ says drummer Greg Saunier, on the eve of Deerhoof’s appearance at this month’s Maximum Black mini-festival, their debut tour with new guitarist Ed Rodriguez (XBXRX, the Flying Luttenbachers). ‘But we never know what we’re going to do.’

Saunier, he of the tiny kit and maniacal beats, has anchored the group since their beginnings in the early ’90s, when he and pal Rob Fisk sprouted Deerhoof from the ashes of a Bay Area goth-metal band as a spastic, elastic duo equally capable of no-wave destruction as idiosyncratic pop. Even among the old heads of the Bay Area improv scene of the time, Deerhoof were the kind of unhinged out-ish curio that shocked and confused more than most. Fresh out of conservatory, Saunier was ready for anything. ‘I never knew what I would do then,’ he says. ‘And I still don’t know what I’ll do now.’

Now, as then, Saunier’s playing is something that has to be seen to be believed. At a recent Osaka show he hit himself in the face with his stick, lost his stick, then kept playing with his hands, blood flying everywhere. Tellingly, the band never broke step. Live, Saunier, guitarist John Dieterich and singer/bassist Satomi Matzusaki display the kind of absurd telepathy that allows their arrangements to stretch, transform and stop on a dime without so much as a glance in each other’s direction.

Fittingly for a band so indebted to intuition, Deerhoof came together ‘totally randomly’, Saunier explains.

‘I admit we were looking for a singer when we met Satomi. But Satomi had never sang in a band before and had no musical experience whatsoever, and no desire to do music actually. I like to think that Deerhoof unlocked the musical genius that was sleeping inside of her.’ Matsuzaki’s faux-innocent, sing-song vocals proved the perfect foil to Saunier and Fisk’s acrobatics, trading in the kind of instant accessibility that began to make Deerhoof’s music, for all its detours, unmistakably pop.

When Fisk quit, in 1999, Deerhoof went back to the drawing board. Running into guitarist John Dieterich, one of those freakish, untrained types, the new trio spent two years essentially re-inventing the band. ‘He had never heard Deerhoof,’ Saunier says of Dieterich, ‘and we had never heard any of his music, and we didn’t know him at all. He just joined and that was it.’

And so it was. Announcing themselves with 2002’s Reveille, the trio hit upon an alchemy that spawned an outstanding run of albums, each garnering more acclaim for re-fashioning the stop/start no-wavey skronk of their beginnings into utterly unpredictable pop. The kind that even Saunier, fifteen years deep in this experiment, can’t really put into words without making himself sick.

‘I never know what to say,’ he admits, when asked how he would describe Deerhoof. ‘At customs when the agents ask what kind of music we play, John always says “rock” and I start feeling like I want to throw up.’ So do any labels fit? ‘If John said “classical music” then I think I’d feel okay,’ he says. ‘And if he said “traditional music” I think I might even be happy.’

Admittedly, the tradition of what Deerhoof do — marrying the violent with the cutesy, Matsuzaki’s playful vocals floating atop impossibly heavy power chords — is a thin one, the kind of experimental music that favors spontaneity over self-consciousness, hooks over weirdness for weirdness’ sake. Which could explain the broad popularity of such a genuinely weird band, and why kids dig them so much.

‘We play all ages shows whenever we can, which almost every show, at least in the U.S.,’ Saunier says of the band’s preferred audience. ‘I just remember when I was kid, the concerts I saw made such an impression on me, my life changed after that. I would like to be a part of that kind of experience for people.’

But when I tell him I enjoy Deerhoof, as many people do, for their commitment to making ecstatic music in troubled times, Saunier demurs. ‘I’m grateful you hear ecstasy in our songs,’ he says, speaking of a band he believes are trying their hand more than ever. ‘But I’d be just as grateful if you heard foreboding, sadness, fear, collapse in it. I think it’s all there, if you put that lens on it.’

‘To me every year has brought greater risks, or greater daring, not less,’ Saunier continues. ‘Every year the new song ideas that we each bring to each other are more and more ludicrous, like “how in the world can we do a song like that?!”’


Originally published in Exberliner Magazine, March 2008

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