Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t spent enough time listening to Deerhoof—the furiously inventive quartet treats each of their new albums as an opportunity for creative rebirth. And yet somehow, they’re also profoundly reliable, a strange but true descriptor for a band so creatively restless. You never know what a new Deerhoof album might sound like, except that it will always sound like Deerhoof.

They are defined by such paradoxes, as 'Noble and Godlike in Ruin' reaffirms. Their latest album is either a portrait of a world descending into monstrous hate, dehumanization, and dollar signs, or a haunting self-portrait of band-as-monster: an intelligent, sensitive, hybrid creature, singing tirelessly of love, but increasingly alienated from that world.

The music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, all at once. Strings that evoke avant-garde chamber music and classic horror-film soundtracks bounce off guitar and bass lines that chug on impervious to the creeping dread. The drums are sometimes filtered to sound almost electronic, but no computer could come up with rhythms so funky and dynamic, with each minute variation from one snare hit to the next conveying worlds of possibility. Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto. A voice of solitude, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom, even as she contributes to it with her jaggedly precise bass parts. As a first-generation immigrant to the US, she’s never tried to disguise her Japanese accent, or her deadpan, karaoke-esque delivery. On 'Noble and Godlike in Ruin', her sense of remove feels alternately like an expression of loneliness and like a cool provocation to systems of oppression and control. “Kindness is all I needed from you,” she sings on the epic album closer 'Immigrant Songs'. “But you think we’re in your house.” Not long after, the song detonates, its tightly wound art-pop giving way to several minutes of howling noise.

Though the subject matter may be bleak—how could it not be?—the songs carry an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom. There’s that famous Dylan Thomas line about raging against the dying of the light: 'Noble and Godlike in Ruin' feels a little like that. The world may be going down, but Deerhoof is going down swinging.

TRACK LISTING

1. Overrated Species Anyhow
2. Sparrow Sparrow
3. Kingtoe
4. Return Of The Return Of The Fire Trick Star
5. A Body Of Mirrors
6. Ha, Ha Ha Ha, Haaa
7. Disobedience
8. Who Do You Root For?
9. Under Rats (featuring Saul Williams)
10. Immigrant Songs

OOIOO, Blonde Redhead, Guerilla Toss, Rolling Stones, Liars, Marnie Stern, Yoko Ono, Battles. Clear Sun Vinyl. Reissue of Deerhoof’s 2002 album Reveille. First Deerhoof album with guitarist John Dieterich. 

Deerhoof debuts their new guitarist John Dieterich and achieves widespread critical acclaim for the first time. 2002’s Reveille is a defiant expression of artistic rebirth, spilling over with madcap exuberance, apocalyptic imagery, newfound technical confidence belying their no-budget DIY recording methods, and jarring stylistic about-faces in which no two songs sound alike. The contrast of Satomi’s ever-catchy, ever-charming melodiousness with John and Greg’s noisy, cinematic bombast still has the power to thrill and tickle and upset, more than 20 years after its initial release. Includes reimagined cover art with the faint morning glow the band had always envisioned, pressed on clear sun-colored vinyl. Complete lyrics included for the first time, written by Satomi on the center labels. 

TRACK LISTING

1 Sound The Alarm
2 This Magnificent Bird Will Rise
3 The Eyebright Bugler
4 Punch Buggy Valves
5 No One Fed Me So I Stayed
6 Frenzied Handsome, Hello!
7 Days & Nights In The Forest
8 Top Tim Rubies
9 Hark The Umpire
10 Our Angel's Ululu
11 The Last Trumpeter Swan
12 Tuning A Stray
13 Holy Night Fever
14 All Rise
15 Cooper
16 Hallelujah Chorus

Over eighteen boundless albums as experimental as they are pop, Deerhoof has continuously quested for radical sounds and daring storytelling. 2020’s Future Teenage Cave Artists explored fairytale visions of post-apocalypse, welding intrinsic melodies with absurdist digital recording methods. Its sequel Love-Lore, a live covers medley, channeled futurist mid-century artists Parliament, Sun Ra and Stockhausen, to name a handful into a patchwork love letter to the anti-authoritarian expressions that inspire the band.

Galvanized by the challenge of unifying many styles of music, Deerhoof landed on their next record’s concept: baroque gone DIY. Actually, You Can is a genre-abundant record that uses technicolor vibrancy and arpeggiated muscularity to offer a vital shock from capitalism’s purgatorial hold. “In the United States now, to be a moral person means to be a criminal, whether it has to do with a general strike or forming a union or Black Lives Matter protests,” clarifies Saunier of the album’s countercultural embrace of liberation. “If you follow the rules, you’re guilty. That’s the spirit we were trying to express: an angelic prison bust, a glamorous prison bust.” It’s a condemnation of America’s mundanity, replacing violence with the heartfelt power of mutualism.

With state lines and oceans separating band members, Deerhoof not only reinvented their sonic and thematic credo, but also their recording process. Deerhoof’s players are not strangers to home-recording their individual parts, and have long embraced composing via file trading. But 2020’s halt to touring kicked off their longest separation from playing together, foregrounding new priorities. As the group’s combined demos became increasingly layered, bassist and vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki put her foot down, insisting the new album should replicate concert energy. Visualizing the quartet on huge stages with past tourmates Radiohead and Red Hot Chili Peppers, Saunier fugue-arranged his bandmates’ complex demos into songs to make an audience smile and dance. He sought out far-traveling delays, heavy playing, and unique panning to evoke the power of outdoor music. Matsuzaki scrutinized spots that would betray the conceit, eliminating anything that took away from the sound of onstage grandeur. “We spent so much time imagining playing together in the process of recording, it’s almost like a false memory of us playing this music together,” Saunier marvels.

For Deerhoof’s members to continually uncover new corners of their own talent requires deep wells of gratitude, not only for each others’ creativity but for the freedom their career affords. But by embracing each other’s art with curiosity, Deerhoof authors a musical alphabet that continues to astound and inspire, a unique lexicon expanding limitlessly with each album. For new listeners and decades-long devotees, Deerhoof’s electrifying, generous approach to collaborative worldbuilding on Actually, You Can is an emboldening call to support our communities with renewed strength, infinite love, and the resilience to keep exploring.

TRACK LISTING

1. Be Unbarred, O Ye Gates Of Hell
2. Department Of Corrections
3. We Grew, And We Are Astonished
4. Scarcity Is Manufactured
5. Ancient Mysteries, Described
6. Plant Thief
7. Our Philosophy Is Fiction
8. Epic Love Poem
9. Divine Comedy

Over the past couple of years while making their new album, Deerhoof have been asking themselves if there was any music they could create that expressed how our rapidly emerging future might actually feel. The band envisioned an album about people haunted by memory of a lost world and of every failed attempt to save it. People already living outside the system, already having practiced new ways of life required for survival - these hopeful heroes are Deerhoof's inspiration. These are the FTCA. Faithful listeners will recognize a certain alienated but transformational figure who shows up in Deerhoof songs going back to their earliest days. Take the narrator of "The Perfect Me" from 2007's Friend Opportunity: an orphaned but eager soul attempting to entice other wounded wanderers who might lack a home, a clan, a family, a history.

But on FTCA our protagonist is threatened by terror lurking around every corner. Add to that the fact that our 'cast-off queen,' our 'maniac,' our 'terrible daughter' is watching themselves get orphaned in real time, by an older generation in power that would seemingly rather see life on Earth destroyed than let go of archaic systems of capital. Like a lot of the music they have released over the last quarter-century, the Deerhoof of FTCA (Satomi Matsuzaki on bass and vocals, Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich on guitars, and Greg Saunier on drums, vocals and piano) stitches together fragments of 'r&b' and 'classic rock' and transforms them into a new language of revolution, forgoing verse-chorus structures for dream logic and blind intuition. But what makes this album different is its intimacy, the blues riffs and slide guitars are joined by rusty pianos and whispered three-part harmonies.

In this sense, FTCA inverts the formula of Deerhoof's last album, Mountain Moves, which invited a wide community of collaborators to band together in an open celebration of solidarity. The new one, on the other hand, is borne of self-isolation and deprivation. It's the sound of a sparkling, manic musical intelligence being disconnected from a nourishing public and devouring itself inside its own cocoon, attempting metamorphosis. Guitar pedals malfunction mid-take, reverbs chop off mid-tail, drum fills get abandoned mid-phrase. Some musical moments, as gorgeous and touching as anything Deerhoof has ever written, stop short for no apparent reason, giving way to queasy smudges of sound.

Many of the instruments and voices were recorded with nothing more than the built-in mic of a laptop. Harsh splices make no effort to hide the seams. In this way FTCA joins a long and storied lineage of pop records that expose the insular and reclusive nature of the recording process itself. Like Let It Be, There's a Riot Goin' On, or Sister Lovers, this record is its own "making-of." Absence is a central character in the drama. For every heartwarming melody or pile-up of parade drums or shard of loopy guitar noise, there is musical acknowledgement of the toll that constant threat of cataclysm takes on mental health. All funerals remind us that life goes on, somehow. In that time after the end times, it's not only the food systems, energy systems, and political systems that will have to be rebuilt. Myths, stories, and rituals we use to make sense of the world are up for revision, too. This is a record about resilience and the persistence of hope in a future beyond any reasonable justification for it. Like so many young people today, Deerhoof seems to be already living in that future.

TRACK LISTING

1 Future Teenage Cave Artists
2 Sympathy For The Baby Boo
3 The Loved One
4 O Ye Saddle Babes
5 New Orphan Asylum For Spirited Deerchildren
6 Zazeet
7 Fraction Anthem
8 "Farewell" Symphony
9 Reduced Guilt
10 Damaged Eyes Squinting Into The Beautiful Overhot Sun
11 I Call On Thee

Recommend If You Like: DEERHOOF (!), Blonde Redhead, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Animal Collective, Liars, Lightning Bolt // “...the best band in the world...” Pitchfork // Deerhoof and Joyful Noise Recordings will issue the first ever vinyl edition of the band’s third LP, Halfbird. Originally released in July 2001 by Menlo Park Records, Halfbird is 14 tracks of playful absurdity and pummeling energy, featuring founding member Greg Saunier (drums - guitar - vocals); Satomi Matsuzaki (vocals - bass); and Rob Fisk (guitar). 2019 sees the 25-year anniversary of Deerhoof being a band. To celebrate the occasion, three labels that have worked with Deerhoof over the course of their expansive and colorful career will each reissue one of the first three Deerhoof LPs: 1997's The Man, The King, The Girl (Polyvinyl); 1999's Holdypaws (Kill Rock Stars); and 2001’s Halfbird (Joyful Noise Recordings). 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: One of Deerhoof's classics gets the reish treatment, and the timind couldn't be better. What else could you want in these troubling times than a slab of grooving, psychy noise rock.

TRACK LISTING

Halfrabbit Halfdog
Six Holes On A Stick
Red Dragon
Trickybird
The Man The King The Girl And The Spider
Witchery Glamour Spell
Queen Orca Wicca Wind
Sunnyside, Carriage
Littleness
Xmas Tree
Rat Attack
The Forty Fours 
Halfmole Halfbird.

After all the accolades from press and peers, what’s a legendary band left to do? Rent out an abandoned office space in the middle of the desert in New Mexico in lieu of a regular recording studio, go in with little or no preconceived notions of what would happen, set up, plug in and get loud! After seven days Deerhoof had found (you guessed it) ‘The Magic’, a raw and refreshing wallop of an album about leaving your comfort zone and finding a pineapple.

With ‘The Magic’, Deerhoof dreamed up an alchemy of '77 punk, pop, glam, hair metal, doo-wop, hip hop, and R&B, late-night car rides, long days, spandex, shadows, and attitude. Poetry into noise, volume knobs into pleasure, friendship into rock band.

"Maybe it came from the music we liked when we were kids, when music was like magic - before we knew about the industry and before there were rules - sometimes hair metal is the right choice. We all showed up in the mood to sing," says drummer Greg Saunier.

For singer and bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, the making ‘The Magic’ was the latest episode of an ongoing gamble. "I joined this band a week after I arrived in San Francisco from Japan. I hopped on a MUNI bus to have a first meeting with Deerhoof. I got off at a wrong stop. I was lost and confused. They found me on a dark street corner after I called for help from a pay phone. Since then my adventure expanded. Deerhoof is a vehicle with four powered wheels that takes me through forest, desert and buildings. My life is adventure!"

‘The Magic’ is a mixtape imbued with Deerhoof's sorcery; boldness, wonder, technical know-how, risk. It is a mixtape by the kid with the biggest music collection you've ever seen, who will take you camping and show you how to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Never one to go with the flow, Deerhoof have once again come up with a fresh approach to songwriting. Both psychedelic and melodic, but never boring, Shimmering guitar hooks and grooving bass permeate the driving drum refrains. Slightly hazy vocals float atop murky rivers of grunge. Post-punk attitude with a psychedelic sheen. Impossible to categorise, but easy to appreciate. Classic Deerhoof.

TRACK LISTING

01. The Devil And His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue
02. Kafe Mania!
03. That Ain’t No Life To Me
04. Life Is Suffering
05. Criminals Of The Dream
06. Model Behavior
07. Learning To Apologize Effectively
08. Dispossessor
09. I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire
10. Acceptance Speech
11. Patrasche Come Back
12. Debut
13. Plastic Thrills
14. Little Hollywood
15. Nurse Me

On one special night, the band took to the bandstand in a tiny Tokyo club while the tape was rolling. The result is Fever 121614. With gems from throughout the band’s ridiculously deep back catalog, the 12-song collection that appears on both the LP and the video is Deerhoof at their rawest.

TRACK LISTING

1. Exit Only 
2. Paradise Girls 
3. Let's Dance The Jet 
4. Doom 
5. Fresh Born  
6. We Do Parties 
7. Buck And Judy  
8. Dummy Discards A Heart 
9. Twin Killers 
10. I Did Crimes For You  
11. There's That Grin 
12. Come See The Duck 

Transgressive Records are proud to announce that Berlin’s instrumental collective s t a r g a z e have signed to the label, anointing their partnership with the stunning EP ‘Deerhoof Chamber Variations’.

‘Deerhoof Chamber Variations’ is devised as a continuous piece of instrumental music, based on 9 1/2 songs which drummer and composer Greg Saunier originally wrote for his acclaimed band Deerhoof.

Different from most other band and orchestra / classical collaborations Greg himself arranged and recomposed the material for a classical chamber ensemble, using exactly the same notes as in the originals while rearranging the songs structurally, in a kind of miniaturizing and abstracting way.

s t a r g a z e adapted this new composition to their particular line-up and the musicians’ personal skills, as Greg Saunier produced the album in Berlin in the freezing winter days of December 2015. The intimacy is evident - favouring the dry sound of the Beatles and George Martin’s approach to recording classical ensembles, rather than the lush approach favoured today.

The 19 minute piece of music is the latest in a series of collaborations for s t a r g a z e, who have previously worked with Julia Holter, Owen Pallett, Nils Frahm and Matthew Herbert.

First single from forthcoming album "Deerhoof vs. Evi.l".

Includes brand new b-side "Hitchcock" and also previously unreleased live version of "Rainbow Silhouette Of The Milky Rain" from the album "Milk Man".

'Good and bad title, made up by Greg Saunier. I love this song! Rave pop rock! Reminds me of 80s neo romantic music ... 'Me to the rescue!' I am gonna come to rescue you! 'You to the rescue!' Please rescue your friends who are lonely.” - Satomi on ‘Super Duper Rescue Heads !’

Having formed in 1994, Deerhoof is now that fateful age and by rites it's the band's turn to go out and challenge the world. The same way a rebellious adolescent turns tough and irrational, Greg Saunier, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Satomi Matsuzaki just up and split from San Francisco, the only home they've ever known as a band, and left behind all notions of what a "Deerhoof record sounds like." The result is Deerhoof vs. Evil (the band’s 11th album!). The musical equivalent of hormones raging out of control, it explodes out of the speakers with its gawky triumph and inflamed sentimentality. These are songs that practically demand that you dance and sing along (however elastic the rhythms, or abrupt the melodies). Right from “Qui Dorm, Només Somia” (sung in Catalan), it's evident that Deerhoof aren't afraid to take chances (critics be damned).

Ironically the result is polished, blissfully exuberant, and huge-sounding. Going DIY meant freedom to reinvent themselves, playing each others' instruments, altering those instruments so drastically as to be unrecognisable, (those aren't Joanna Newsom or Konono No. 1 samples, those are John and Ed's guitars), and generally splashing their sonic colours into the most unexpected combinations.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Playful, crazy, clever, cute pop, and with a top message as well. Excellent.