Deerhoof Listening Club

Some of their new stuff seems to have a bit of TMTKTG-ness to it… Spotify just went straight into the below and I didn’t clock it for the first half of the song!

There’s a lot more “pop” listening back to it now than when I first heard it. The big metal bin sound was hard to take at first, especially with some of the hard panning (good example being The Pickup Bear), but it’s not as jarring now.

I’d add that it’s a very vibrant form of lofi. Big metal bin indeed, but it’s a very shiny bin. Can see yr face in it.

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Listening on speakers so it might feel a bit different with a headphones listen, but… I think this is pretty much exactly what I have always wanted from a Deerhoof album? It’s bright, chaotic, rich. It is an absolute blender of noise and pop and ideas. There are a couple of weaker moments towards the beginning but maybe it was just because I didn’t have my ear in yet and I’ll like them more next time.

Queen of the Mole People is the biggest highlight for me.

Sounds like exactly the type of thing I used to like listening to when I had an odd migraine, which probably sounds odd, but it was like… the migraine was my brain being itchy and a certain type of noise scratched it and gave some relief?

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Mentioned in the Deerhoof thread ,but worth a mention here. They have a b sides and rareities album out on Bandcamp Friday. If there is any Deerhoof historians in here , I’d be interested to know what eras the songs come from. Bandcamp description is just b sides and rareities from 25 years of the band

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Sorry I’m very unorganised, I’ll do up a proper schedule soon!

2.
Holdypaws
1999

First time listening to this one! The chaos and rougher edges of The Man, The King, The Girl are paired down into something a bit more structured – kind of bizarro thrashy garage rock; and though more structured, maybe a bit more limited than the everything-goes chaos of its predecessor (is it a controversial opinion to say “Data” definitely goes on way longer than it needs to?). I’m just reading some of the notes on the Bandcamp release and they’re really interesting – esp. the keyboard that’s used and Saunier’s description of the album as "a [charmingly] failed attempt to be a perfectly recorded mainstream rock record”.

I like that last description because it kind of typifies what’s so great about the band – their ambition to make Cracking Pop Choons™ colliding with their own unabashed idiosyncrasies and sort of avant-gardisms to make something really special.

I think my favourite track is “Crow”. It’s like Shellac (who also, I just remember, had a song called “Crow”) but super pretty-sounding.

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I’m just reading those Bandcamp notes properly. Saunier is such a good drummer that he can make sampled drums played on a keyboard sound convincingly like he’s drumming live. That’s insane.

“I didn’t even play drums on that album,” Saunier observes. “I sampled one bass drum hit from Ringo Starr’s drum solo on Abbey Road and loaded it into a keyboard Bob had. Then I took the snare drum hit from what was then the new record from Keith Richards And The X-Pensive Winos. So the drums on Holdypaws are just two keys on a keyboard — one was the bass drum, and one was the snare. I was just completely convinced that was the way to create a hi-fi record, because every single drum hit would sound exactly the same on every song, and would be the perfect tones.”

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It’s interesting listening to these after reading the bandcamp notes. You never would have guessed they were going for hi fi power pop. My favorite two are the Shellac sounding ones over the lo fi Weezer sounding ones or the lo fi kinda nothing songs. Enjoyed the listen but don’t think I’d go back to this much outside the above mentioned Deerhoof cover Shellac songs. The first album had a kind of endearing and unique quirkyness to it, where as this sounds just like a band finding their way .

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I can really empathise with that kind of naivety! Reminds me a bit of when I’d started making music and would stumble upon things I thought I’d invented that I definitely hadn’t.

And yeah, I think it’s more consistent by design than the first but it doesn’t hit those chaotic heights. It’s quite cool cause I’d say the later stuff finds the sweet spot in the middle of those two things. I’m curious what the next album will sound like (I’d heard The Man… and I’d heard bits of Holdypaws but, to my knowledge, I’ve not heard any Halfbird).

Incidentally when I put a schedule together, I’ll add Green Cosmos at @BifoIsou’s wise suggestion (that’s the one with ‘Come See the Duck’, right?) aaaaand also Balter / Saunier, the collab album they did with Ensemble del Niente (the Chamber Variations would be really interesting to hear again in the context of a listening club; and Balter’s composition for Deerhoof is a real goodie, too).

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Satan is
Satan is
Satan is
Satan is

Over and over and over
Meow meow meow meow
Meow meow meow meow

Love this band

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Much preferred this album to the first one, think the first was too rough around the edges for me (I liked it but don’t think I’d go back, apart from Gore Rut maybe).

This one felt a bit more focused and listenable, and closer to what I’ve heard of their later stuff.

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Gave Holdypaws a listen at the weekend and really enjoyed it. Also wouldn’t have suspected them of trying to achieve a hifi sound! But still sounded more accessible than anticipated following The Man, the King, the Girl. Didn’t think for a second the drums were sampled! Need to give it some more listens.

Was trying to find interviews with them around the time it was released but landed on the below article instead. Really enjoyed the description of Satomi learning to play bass:

Matsuzaki says that when she joined the band for The Man , she was learning how to sing and play bass in real-time. “I didn’t know how to play,” she says, “so I started just banging on it on the floor. I broke Rob’s bass! Then, I [properly] wore the bass and tried to play melodies.”

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3.
Halfbird
2001

Quite interesting that there’s some crossover between this and Holdypaws in terms of when they were made. This one definitely makes sense as a follow-up to The Man, The King, The Girl. It has the freewheeling spirit and lo-fi vibrance of that record (while doing so with more structured songs). Out of these super early ones, it’s the one that most strongly brings to mind their later work. I’m thinking Apple O specifically at a number of points.

Reading the Bandcamp notes to this one (and I have the article @kram linked to open in another tab) and it provides surprisingly downbeat background to such an energetic album. Looking forward to Reveille next week – I’ve hardly heard anything off that (though it was in stock in my old uni’s library, which delighted me no end), but I know that many people really rate it.

Concluding the super lo-fi first three albums, I really like this quote from Satomi in the BC notes…

“These albums are almost like science fiction to me. We had all these fantasies about what we wanted to do musically and we were struggling to meet that reality. But I feel like the labels and people we worked with believed in our weird fantasy. I still believe in that fantasy and after 25 years I still like these albums. I hope people will enjoy too.”

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I really like some of the quieter moments on this album too, really nice twinkly guitars on bits of Trickybird for eg

“The Man The King The Girl And The Spider” is the sort of thing that my will make my wife turn around, pull a face and ask what the fuck I’m listening to.

Enjoying this so far

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I think Half Bird might be the last Deerhoof album I’ve not heard before. Really enjoying it. It definitely feels like they’re evolving. Satomi’s voice in particular. There are points where she sounds totally different to later records. Particularly when being shouty, but when it quietens down there’s more melody coming in, and you start seeing later Deerhoof in it. Six Holes on a Stick is a good example of both - all shouty, but when it slows down it sounds like it could be from The Runners Four, both in the vocals and the guitar (when it’s making a schrwwwoaroww sound - techinical term there).

Me too. First 5/5 Deerhoof album chronologically for me. Love it to death. Going to continue listening to Half Bird this week and post again if anything interesting pops into my head. Going to read those liner notes @manches mentions too.

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just listening to one of the few tracks I’ve heard from Reveille and hearing it in the context of their previous stuff, I can kind of hear their elation at having hit upon what they’re aiming for across those three previous albums

possibly nay probably just projecting

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Weirdly this is making me think of Youthmovies of all bands in places.

Still think the first album is my favourite of these three, I enjoyed the chaos and disorder of that a lot. Not to say I haven’t really liked the others, I love how much stuff they can blend and throw together in a way few bands manage quite as successfully.

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Happy birthday to Greg and may I add that Reveille is a thing of beauty (which I’ll probably post of later on)

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