Deerhoof, Offend Maggie
San Francisco's weirdest and most loveable band
Deerhoof preceded their ninth studio album with an unusual kind of single. Instead of an MP3, the San Francisco group posted the sheet music for "Fresh Born" online, and asked listeners who wanted to hear what the new Deerhoof song sounded like to find out by performing it themselves (and sending the band the results). It was a gimmick, but a clever one — it demonstrated that their songs are actually tightly composed, no matter how splattery they sound, and that they think intently about the way their instrumental voices and Satomi Matsuzaki's tuneful, blasé soprano fit together. And that's how there came to be several dozen instant cover versions of a song whose chorus begins, "Mini body S.O.S. dotty/ Downy hairy tiptoeing moony."
After a couple of years as a trio, Deerhoof have added second guitarist Ed Rodriguez for Offend Maggie. More than ever, they're constructing their songs around jolting contrasts — not just loud vs. quiet or conventional riffs vs. dissonant tone-clusters, but the contrast between operating according to the standard principles of hard rock and utterly shunning those principles. Hard rock is loud and grand; Deerhoof alternate precise, headbanging riffs with reserved, blurry smears of sound. Hard rock is macho and concrete in its meaning; Matsuzaki's voice and delivery couldn't be less like a grown man's, and her lyrics, sometimes in Japanese and sometimes in curious English, are somewhere between impressionistic and totally abstract.
It's something of a tradition for Deerhoof albums to start with a full-throttle riff-rocker, and this time "The Tears and Music of Love" slams like Houses of the Holy-era Zep. (Drummer Rob Saunier, the only constant member of the band since its inception in the early '90s, gets extra credit for his body-slam timekeeping.) So, naturally, most of the album stands in contrast to it: the wobbling squeal-and-crawl of "Buck and Judy," a tiny acoustic interlude called "Don't Get Born," a piece called "Basket Ball Get Your Groove Back" that disassembles what might once have been a straightforward riff and spreads its pieces out to admire. The harmonies at the beginning of "Family of Others" are the closest Deerhoof have ever come to the Beach Boys — which isn't that close, granted. Few bands are both this weird and this easy to love.
