, was an eclectic affair with excursions into rap and opera and an enviable slate of guest stars—even at just 40 minutes, it’s perhaps the closest Deerhoof will come to its own, Deerhoof follows the opposite path, eschewing outside contributors and retreating into its own insular world of noise: explosive rhythms, serrated guitar riffs, damaged fragments of melody and sweetness.
It’s the sound only the four members of Deerhoof could make, with perhaps a greater-than-usual emphasis on keyboards: the shimmery synths infiltrating the title track, the strained piano arpeggios shepherding us into “Reduced Guilt”; the album even concludes with a deceptively straightforward recital of a Johann Sebastian Bach piece on piano. Not every experiment lands , but it’s all of a piece with Deerhoof’s spirit of anarchist invention.
The vulnerable moments are the key to this record’s revolutionary beating heart. Besides being Deerhoof’s most concise and insular album sincealso crystallizes the group’s increasingly vocal interest in leftist politics and feels like a rejoinder to critics who have over the years dismissed the group’s childlike lyrics as nonsense.
Much like “I Will Spite Survive” from the last album, it’s a solid summation of Deerhoof’s ethos twenty-five years in: improbable survival. This band has been making this bizarre racket for a quarter century without rest. Even if nothing on here rises to the career-best heights of 2003’s, it’s another strong album from a band whose sheer continued existence often feels like a triumph of absurdity in the face of encroaching hopelessness.
Zach Schonfeld is a freelance writer and journalist based in New York. He contributes regularly to Paste, Pitchfork, VICE, and other publications. Previously, he was a senior writer for Newsweek.
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