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Deerhoof |
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Sometimes
you need to see bands live in order to fully appreciate their albums. For
example, I only moderately liked Chokebore until I saw them on stage and then I
became a die-hard fan. I moderately enjoyed Deerhoof’s Reveille before
seeing them live. Since I saw this tall inventive drummer ill-treating his 3
pieces drums (bass drum, snare drum & ride) in various slantwise positions,
this small Japanese girl playing bass and singing with a child’s voice while
performing choreographs (Panda, panda…) and these two other guys playing
guitar on each side of the drums, I’ve discovered another dimension in the
album.
Before
the gig, I liked Deerhoof and considered the cd as a collection of jagged (both
in time and structure) noise-pop songs containing from time to time passages à
la Blonde Redhead interspersed by peculiar intermissions. There is of course not
as energy on the album if you compare it with what is developed on stage but the
songs somehow reach a new dimension. Now I still sometimes have the feeling of
moments close to Blonde Redhead, mainly due to the singing when it is soft and
to some guitar lines (‘This Magnificent Bird Will Rise’ and the wonderful
‘The last Trumpeter Swan’ or ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ for example) but they
definitely have a jagged aspect. Intermissions take on new charm as well (‘No
one Fed me so I stayed’, ‘looper’) while we still don’t know if some
tracks are intermissions or real songs that are shortened (‘The Eyebright
Bugler’, ‘Top tim rubies’, “Hark the empire”). A friend of ours told
us that in his opinion DeerHoof is a crossover between Yoko Ono and bands like
The Red Crayola that used to play very jagged songs (“Holy night fever”,
“Frenzied handsome hello’), which I guess depicts quite well the tension
between Satomi’s childlike vocals and Greg’s fierce drumming. Anyway,
Deerhoof is a weird noise-pop band which could easily please a larger audience;
after all a song such as ‘Punch Buggy Valves’ is a short, noisy and
incredibly catchy piece.
-Blacklisted Igor
/mar 1st 2003/