Send "Deerhoof " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Deerhoof are at the point in a band’s career when critics can’t help but review the band itself just as much as any particular release. The group has been producing albums steadily since 1997. Multiple members have come and gone, including co-founder Rob Fisk. Most importantly, Deerhoof have gradually consolidated their chaotic, confrontational sound into something more recognizable—if only because that something is, by now, so obviously and familiarly Deerhoof.Deerhoof Vs. Evil is the group’s 10th studio album. Like 2008’s Offend Maggie and 2007’s Friend Opportunity, it finds the band more at home with their established sound than the release before. That’s not to say that they’ve stagnated. As Henry Rollins said of the band in a 2008 interview with Paste Magazine, Deerhoof are so impressive precisely because “[t]hey do a thing and they keep reinventing the thing”. So what is that ‘thing’? Deerhoof excel at a kind of off-kilter, experimental kitsch. Their songs frequently confound expectations or invert the conventions of form and affectation. You might even recognize a riff or a phrase from some wholly unrelated and, in fact, incongruous area of life or music. In other words, the typical Deerhoof album is unpredictable. In that sense, Deerhoof Vs. Evil is about what you would expect. There’s the ceaseless shifting of one configuration to another, as when the unassuming plunking of the introduction gives way to a cacophony of ascending guitars and percussion, only to slide into a solemn, plodding vocal melody on “Qui Dorm, Només Somia”. There’s the overblown ecstacy of the band’s not-infrequent, riff-driven catharses, as when distorted guitar drowns the helicopter synths and curiously ass-shaking bass with righteous, monolithic fury on “Super Duper Rescue Heads!”. And there’s the group’s ever-strange lyrics, delivered with unflinching earnesty by Satomi Matsuzaki in a surreal soprano. She sings on “I Did Crimes for You”, “This is a stickup / Smash the windows / The people are wrong / The leader is strong.”...full text |
| Rocksound |
| If Major Gowen from Fawlty Towers had experienced Deerhoof, he would unquestionably describe them as “damned inscrutable fellows” and the BBC would have internal meetings about whether this was now too politically incorrect to broadcast. Their songs, while essentially playful and lovable – more so than ever on ‘Vs Evil’, the San Francisco band’s 10th album, which features near-lounge music moments – have a hard centre and are often tricky to parse, thanks in no small part to Satomi Matsuzaki’s lyrics. This, along with the gently jarring chord-tangles throughout these 12 songs, makes for a Deerhoof album that’s just different enough, and just enough the same....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| Given how hard Deerhoof hit you over the head with weird, it can actually come off as brazenly traditionalist, like a group that moves to Nashville for no reason or a rib fest blues guitarist wearing a black Panama hat. Except instead of rootsy apocrypha, Deerhoof plug in to the star-childish exponentialism that paved the way for orgies and prog. There are plenty of other bands that make more explicit reference to this or that Peruvian psych outfit, and Deerhoof without a doubt succeeds (fails?) in sounding like a credible indie-rock band at the same time. But so, too, does it gaze wide-eyed toward a future when accelerated time signature shifts will allow man to ascend to the astral plane. I have no idea whether the members of Deerhoof really channel Scriabin. But one does hear in them a schizophrenic impatience with form that makes their work, lovely and well-executed in moments, basically a document of mad utopianism. Deerhoof vs. Evil has all of the 19th century literary ambition that its title implies, grandiosity without a single damn doubt. In pursuit of the extravagantly new (although, yes, this is the band’s 10th album), of reforming indie rock, Deerhoof makes rapid mid-song adjustments, blasting not just from one rhythm to another but also between tempi, density, instrumentation and even genre. “Super Duper Rescue Heads” matches Yes, Richard Wagner or even “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” for dense proximity of melodies, many of which are promising but soon dropped without warning in favor of silliness or simply moving on to the next thing. The predominant modes of Deerhoof are “cool lick,” “Satomi has a goofy voice,” “Satomi’s lyrics are bizarre,” and then “everything is percussive.” To these Deerhoof vs. Evil adds one more, or perhaps merely advances an ongoing experiment: old-fashioned (circa 2000) glitch electronics, such as those that begin the opener “Qui Dorm, Nomes Somia,” are melded or alternated with emphasis on guitar. One of the album’s best aspects is the degree of mystery it embeds by way of such texture....full text |
Deerhoof lyrics
