Deerhoof

Remember how you felt when you were 16?

Deerhoof is now that fateful age, and by rites it's the band's turn to rebel. As if on some adolescent impulse, this year Satomi Matsuzaki, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier, just up and split from San Francisco, the only home they've ever known as a band, and left behind all notions of 'what a Deerhoof record sounds like.'

The result is Deerhoof vs. Evil. This is their paean to gawky triumph and irrational sentimentality. Throughout the record Deerhoof's well-known unconventionality is dressed up in big-hit choruses, and an elastic danceability unique in their storied catalog. Right from “Qui Dorm, Només Somia” (sung in Catalan), you know you're hearing a force to be reckoned with, ready to take on the world and win.

To document this raging of musical hormones, Deerhoof was not going to let anyone tell them what to do. Other than a song composed for Adam Pendleton's documentary film installation BAND ("I Did Crimes for You"), and a cover of an obscure Greek film soundtrack instrumental ("Let's Dance the Jet"), Deerhoof vs. Evil was entirely self-recorded, self-mixed and self-mastered in rehearsal spaces and band-member basements, with no engineers or outside input.

This meant freedom: to reinvent their style, to play each others' instruments, to alter those instruments so drastically as to be unrecognizable. (Those aren't Joanna Newsom or Konono No. 1 samples, those are John and Ed's guitars.) Ironically for a DIY record, the result is polished and huge-sounding, an exuberant pop gem.