Let's
return to 2012. Obama re-elected, the world didn't end, and the much
longed for new season of Arrested Development began filming. A year
unlike any other aside from one crucial way: there was a new Deerhoof
album. Breakup Song is
the 11th
full length the band have released since their 1999 debut, and folows
its predecessor, 2011's Deerhoof Vs. Evil.
A short and frenetic record, it plays like the other side of the
coin, staying in the same relative style over its 11 songs. It's
almost as if Deerhoof have settled into the same prolific, creative
groove they occupied the mid 00s, producing a string of guitar-based
avant-garde noise/pop records that made them one of those “love
it/hate it” bands that provoked arguments between hipster friends.
The
huge difference with modern-Hoof is that they're are no longer just
a guitar-based avant-garde noise/pop band. Over the last half decade,
they've been adding in keyboards, samples, and other modern sounding
electronic flourishes, sounding like something formed from a
combination of the weirdest synth-pop band of all time and a noisy
San Francisco psych-rock band. While there's certainly nothing on
Deerhoof Vs. Evil and
Breakup Song that is
remotely as abrasive as their beloved mid 00s output, it's also true
that it's easy to write them off as 'light' and 'pop leaning' without
giving them their full due. If anything, one could view these two
records as the band finally folding the styles of Friend
Opportunity and the Green
Cosmos EP into their post-The
Runners Four style.
Part
of me wishes Deerhoof would've taken a couple years off and combined
the best bits of Deerhoof Vs. Evil
and Breakup Songs into
a modern sequel to The Runners Four.
However, this would make for an exhausting listen. For all its
variety wrung out of largely the same instrumentation, The
Runners Four holds together
perfectly and also works on a song-by-song basis. Breakup
Songs by contrast, if blown out
to twice its runtime, would be grating and tiring by the time you got
to the last third. There's simply too much packed into songs this
short. So what would
they sound like if Deerhoof had slowed things down and, in general,
stop trying so hard? Probably a more electronic sounding version The
Runners Four.
Now
that Deerhoof are free to use whatever instruments and musical styles
they want to, it's kind of odd how they've lost some of their
imagination and uniqueness. Taken in 20 or 30 second
increments, the songs of Breakup Song
might seem very different from each other; in actual listening
conditions, however, they all kind of run together. Every song
seemingly has to whip through three or four tricks of sound or
structure before the band are satisfied. When you do this over and
over, it stops being interesting and starts making everything sound
the same.
If
they didn't make their songs unpredictable and frenetic all the time,
if they took a few breaths and let song arrangements develop
organically, they might make something truly great again. Deerhoof
keep putting out albums that don't sound like anyone else and I
should love them for it. Instead, I keep thinking “well, maybe next
time they'll get all of it right.” Offend Maggie
and onward, every release is somehow unsatisfying and unmemorable but
never bad enough to merit scorn.
Really,
the main problem with the last few Deerhoof records is that they
don't stick with me in the same way that their earlier works did.
They're weird, but they're only weird in a cloying, self-aware way,
like a death metal cover of a J-pop song, or Low playing a set of
Misfits covers for a Halloween show. Back in the day you'd stumble on
Deerhoof and you couldn't tell if they were playing their instruments
very badly or extremely well; eventually you realized you didn't care
either way. Now their music gives off the impression that everything
is so easy to them that they're paradoxically trying too hard to
compensate for it. There is still that same visceral rush and
whimsical, devil-may-care abandon to the music they're producing
these days, making these albums undeniably Deerhoof in spite of how
different they sound compared to Apple O'...but
I'm perpetually left wishing they would stop trying to push ahead and
take a breather.
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