{"id":22299,"date":"2022-01-21T05:30:42","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T10:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=22299"},"modified":"2022-01-14T15:45:50","modified_gmt":"2022-01-14T20:45:50","slug":"deerhoofs-slow-burn-approach-to-making-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/21\/deerhoofs-slow-burn-approach-to-making-magic\/","title":{"rendered":"Deerhoof’s Slow Burn Approach to Making Magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following feature was commissioned by a publication, but prior to its running, their management made an editorial decision to cut arts and entertainment coverage. I’ve rescued it from obscurity and share it here. — bk.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ever since Deerhoof came together in San Francisco some 25 years ago, the band\u2019s releases have tended to be slow burners. While none of the group\u2019s nearly 20 albums has been pilloried by critics, new Deerhoof releases have sometimes been met initially with muted critical response.<\/p>\n

Yet seemingly inevitably, once a Deerhoof record spent some time out in the world, critics would come around, offering effusive praise for the group\u2019s effective synthesis of the experimental and the accessible. And in recent years, that slow-burn character seems to have dissipated: the band\u2019s three-album volley in the pandemic era \u2013 2020\u2019s Future Teenage Cave Artists<\/i>; the covers mashup Love-Lore<\/i>; and Deerhoof\u2019s latest, Actually, You Can<\/i> \u2013 have all earned widespread positive notices right out of the gate.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Founding member and drummer Greg Saunier laughs at the suggestion that his band\u2019s albums take awhile to be understood and appreciated. He facetiously explains: \u201cWe\u2019re heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick, and he<\/i> always got bad reviews. And then decades later, The Shining<\/i> is the absolute pinnacle of the art form.\u201d As is any given Deerhoof record, he jokes.<\/p>\n

After his giggles subside, Saunier allows that there may be something to that phenomenon. \u201cThere are some people who like it riht away,\u201d he emphasizes. \u201cBut I think our music is a little\u2026 confusing.\u201d He suggests that Deerhoof\u2019s DIY method \u2013 customarily working as a self-contained unit and without the involvement of an outside producer \u2013 can result in some dense music that takes time for listeners to unpack.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of making a record quickly by [booking] three days in a recording studio, we take a year and do it all ourselves,\u201d Saunier says. \u201cAnd with that can come a tendency to overwork, to overthink things. So it doesn\u2019t surprise me at all that someone would be slightly puzzled by what they\u2019re hearing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conscious that his answer might put a negative spin on the situation, Saunier seeks to elaborate further. \u201cMaybe it feels like a lot of information going by really quickly,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the more you listen to it\u2026\u201d He trails off, leaving his statement unfinished and hanging in the air. As with Deerhoof\u2019s music, it\u2019s ultimately up to the listener to complete the thought, to fill in the blanks, making the end product that much more of a personal experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"Saunier says that the insular working methods employed by him and his band mates \u2013 bassist and singer Satomi Matsuzaki plus guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez \u2013 do give Deerhoof\u2019s music its particular character. \u201cThere\u2019s so much that the four of us know and have experienced in common that might not really be in common with anybody else,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have our own musical language.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet for all of Deerhoof\u2019s experimental approaches to constructing music, there\u2019s something approachable about their work. Still, Saunier is taken aback at the suggestion that Deerhoof\u2019s music traffics in pop values. \u201cThat assumes that there are pre-existing rules of how to make hooky or poppy music,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd about how to make dissonant music.\u201d He doesn\u2019t believe that dissonance \u2013 a quality often found in Deerhoof\u2019s music \u2013 undermines its potential commercial appeal.<\/p>\n

\u201cPop music changes a lot,\u201d Saunier emphasizes \u201cIt\u2019s trendy: what makes something \u2018commercial\u2019 seems to be in constant flux.\u201d Every artist, he says, is in a race to figure out what people are going to like six months from now.<\/p>\n

Saunier pauses and backtracks again: not every<\/i> artist. \u201cEven if somebody had this secret that they could whisper to you of how to do commercially appealing music, we are the last people on Earth who’d be able to interpret \u2013 or understand or know or be able to implement \u2013 those rules,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Yet none of that means that Deerhoof is willfully difficult. Commenting on the denseness of the band\u2019s music, Saunier insists that he\u2019s \u201ctrying to get more hooks, not less. I\u2019m trying to provide the consumer with more value.\u201d He says that by having the guitars and bass play different melodies at the same time, he and his band mates aren\u2019t trying to undermine the songs\u2019 intrinsic melodic appeal. \u201cNo, \u201che insists. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to quadruple<\/i> the hookiness!\u201d<\/p>\n

In interviews around the release of last year\u2019s Future Teenage Cave Artists<\/i>, Saunier touted a soon-to-be-released sequel. That sequel is the semi-official Love-Lore<\/i>, available for free on Deerhoof\u2019s Bandcamp site. An inventive melding of songs from across the pop landscape and beyond, it provides a window of sorts into the melange of influences that inform Deerhoof\u2019s original music.<\/p>\n

\"\"Cut live in the studio, Love-Lore<\/i> is a dizzying musical travelogue through Deerhoof\u2019s collective subconscious, featuring snippets of songs like The Beach Boys\u2019 SMiLE<\/i>-era classic \u201cWonderful\u201d jammed up against pieces of Gary Numan, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Voivod, Parliament, Paul Williams (\u201cRainbow Connection\u201d) and too many others to count. It\u2019s a wild ride, the kind of project other bands would be thrilled to release commercially.<\/p>\n

But Love-Lore<\/i> isn\u2019t for sale; not exactly. It\u2019s available as a name-your-price download from the band\u2019s Bandcamp page. \u201cIt\u2019s free because it\u2019s all covers,\u201d Saunier explains. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to mess with all the publishing headaches.\u201d But calling Love-Lore<\/i> a covers album does it an injustice; the song fragments are reprocessed into something new, something uniquely Deerhoof.<\/p>\n

Saunier describes Love-Lore<\/i> as \u201cMusic of all kinds of different genres from the \u201850s to the \u201880s, but just snippets of things: the bass line from this TV theme song, but with the melody from that modern classical piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deerhoof\u2019s latest release, Actually, You Can<\/i> was released digitally and on CD in October, with vinyl scheduled to follow in January. The band\u2019s internal collaboration means that the character of that album \u2013 like all Deerhoof projects \u2013 only revealed itself during the process of creation. \u201cWe often start with a plan,\u201d Saunier says. \u201cBut the idea becomes very confused when it runs up with actual songs or actual human beings. The process of making it reveals the flaws in one’s original manifesto.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saunier says that the path to completion sometimes seems fraught, but it always somehow works out in the end. \u201cThree quarters of the way done making a record, it feels like a total mess,\u201d he admits. \u201cLike, \u2018Do we even have a record here?\u2019 But somehow it magically all starts to fall together. It’s as if there was a theme or a concept hiding in there all along, and we were searching and searching and couldn’t find it. Then, suddenly, it’s there, and it feels like magic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following feature was commissioned by a publication, but prior to its running, their management made an editorial decision to cut arts and entertainment coverage. I’ve rescued it from obscurity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22300,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,41,49,62],"tags":[4751],"class_list":["post-22299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-indie","category-interview","category-new-release","category-rawk","tag-deerhoof","cat-39-id","cat-41-id","cat-49-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22303,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22299\/revisions\/22303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}