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Deerhoof: Fresh Born

Deerhoof

By not changing anything (or changing everything), Deerhoof has made The Magic

After two decades of crafting noisily compelling avant indie art rock—or other silly record-store divider-card descriptions—while disregarding the prevailing sonic trends or studio protocols, Deerhoof approached its new album, The Magic, by defying its standard modus operandi. A neat trick, considering the band doesn’t have one.

“We operate by consensus and never do anything that any one of us doesn’t agree with, and if we can all be satisfied by something, that’s saying a lot,” says drummer Greg Saunier, the band’s sole remaining original member among the longstanding lineup of vocalist/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki and guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez. “We don’t complain about an idea or song if the source doesn’t conform to some previously fixed notion of our band’s system. We don’t have a system. We’re very lucky to have each other.”

Deerhoof’s first Magic steps were inspired by a cattle call for song submissions to HBO for the show that became Vinyl. The band’s licensing company, Terrorbird, forwarded HBO’s request on a Friday; the deadline was the following Monday.

“There’s no way we’re getting a contribution together in two days. We were like, ‘Forget it,’” says Saunier. “The next morning, I thought, ‘It’s too bad, because I’d probably do something like this’ … Before you know it, I’m plugging guitars into the computer and getting together a rough demo. Sunday night, I sent it to Terrorbird and cc’d my bandmates. To my shock, I get an e-mail from John and he’s recorded a demo; a half hour later, Ed sends a song he’s been working on. The original call was pretty specific about the style HBO was looking for. The songs we did are completely different from each other and show the extent to which we seem to be incapable of understanding instructions or imitating musical styles.”

With those three guidepost songs—Dieterich’s “Dispossessor,” Rodriguez’s “That Ain’t No Light To Me” and Saunier’s “Plastic Thrills,” rejected by HBO—along with demos Matsuzaki had done alone, Dieterich rented abandoned office space near his Albuquerque home, where the band convened for a week to shape new material. “Once the band gets their hands on it, all bets are off,” says Saunier. “You really don’t know how things might take off in a different direction.” For The Magic’s wildly diverse stylistic mashup, Deerhoof’s members brought songs that tapped into sounds from their individual childhoods, channeling their inner music fan from a time when adrenaline was a vital mixer for a rock cocktail.

“Old-school rap kept reappearing, and hair metal,” says Saunier. “It was a certain kind of ‘hit’ feeling that we remembered from when we were younger that could inspire you or pump you up.”

Subsequently, The Magic is a wildly varied and brilliantly unhinged soundtrack to a movie played upside down and edited inside out, which still makes a sort of hallucinogenic sense; imagine a round-robin scoring session with the Pixies, Pere Ubu and the Flaming Lips.

There isn’t a hint of compromise in The Magic, but the album could transcend Deerhoof’s loyal fan base and reach a broader audience. Saunier makes it clear that any accessibility on Deerhoof’s part is strictly accidental, other than the intentional part.

“We’re always trying to be accessible, so it’s not more than usual,” he says. “I think this time we let our guard down with each other. Since we’re no longer living in the same city, it’s becomes even less predictable what somebody might present to the band, but it was never predictable when we did live in the same city. Somebody would say, ‘My song goes like this,’ and you’d go, ‘How is that even a song?’ It’s utterly confounding. There’s a process of figuring out what the others are thinking and to make sense of someone’s dream report.”

—Brian Baker