Deerhoof takes its buzz to its founder's hometown
by Joe Tarr
It never made any sense to Chris Cohen. He'd go see his favorite band, Deerhoof, whenever they played out in San Francisco. The group was popular enough in the Bay Area, but Cohen puzzled over why they weren't superstars.
"I always thought, 'Why isn't Deerhoof as popular as the Who?' I liked the idea of Deerhoof being super-famous—I thought their music was great and I wanted people to know about it," says Cohen, who fronted his own band, the Curtains.
Cohen became friends with Deerhoof, and last year they asked him to join. It's doubtful that the band will be playing arenas anytime soon, but Deerhoof is getting a healthy share of indie-buzz these days, becoming critics' darlings and musicians' musicians.
It's not quite the hype that many of the New York and retro art rock bands—the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the White Stripes, the Liars—are getting. But unlike those bands, which are largely recycling sounds from the late '70s, Deerhoof has a feeling and thrill of being something new.
That sound is difficult to describe. Aside from the Who, they've been compared to the likes of Burt Bacharach, Pere Ubu, Cibo Matto, Sesame Street, Wire, and Shonen Knife. One thing is certain, people have fiercely emotional reactions to the music. Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu has been quoted: "Deerhoof make music that is at once all of the confusion and pain and murder that you have in your mind from looking down the road and seeing people pass out on the sidewalk from being too ruined to quit shooting up, and also every bit of hope and care and frenzy that you could ever feel when you see a pelican and a seagull fly over the ocean and both catch a fish at the same second. It is the terror and the, no joke, ultimate beauty made of sound."
Cohen says the Deerhoof hype hasn't really effected the band. "It doesn't really seem to happen where I exist. When you go to a show and there's a lot of people, that's exciting. There's people who that's their job to talk about music. But we don't really talk about music that much," he says. "But I'm really happy people seem to like Deerhoof."
He's speaking from his parents' house in Los Angeles. The band has been using their garage to practice in. They have to quit by dinner time though because the noise bothers the elderly neighbor, the guy who played the bartender in All in the Family.
Cohen toured with the band after 2002's Reveille, and he helped write and record this year's Apple O'. "I'm not sure why they asked me to join," Cohen says. "I was really happy when they asked me." (The Curtains are still active.)
The band has long had somewhat of a revolving membership. Deerhoof was founded by drummer Greg Saunier and Knoxville native Rob Fisk in 1994. Fisk left and rejoined the band a couple of times. In 1999, he quit the band again, amicably, when he and keyboardist Kelly Goode moved away. (Fisk and Goode reside in Knoxville now, fronting 7 Year Rabbit Cycle, which will open the show; Fisk's fantastic artwork is featured on Deerhoof's CDs.)
The mainstays of the group have been Saunier and bassist, vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki. John Dieterich and Cohen fill out the group, both playing guitar.
Deerhoof is known for being oblique in interviews. Cohen is friendly and unpretentious, but he has difficulty articulating. He can't seem to finish a sentence, doubting each thought before it's complete. Saunier used to do a lot of the interviews, Cohen says, but the drummer got frustrated because he'd have long talks with reporters who were too baffled to use anything he said, and the stories would be canned.
On their sixth album, Apple O', the guitar sound is herky-jerky and the drums are solid and stormy. The melodies are usually gleeful, and most of the songs are short. They also add weird atmospheric elements here and there.
The most affecting part of the sound is Matsuzaki's high-pitched and childlike vocals. It's tough to make out her words without the lyric sheet, but the meanings are more visceral than intellectual. There's the elegiac "Apple Bomb," dedicated to the Encephalartos Woodii tree, a species where the female is extinct. Some of it is nonsensical, as on "Flower": Flower/ Power/ Kudzu moods/ I come over/ I take over." "Sealed With a Kiss" is a simple political call to arms for citizens.
The writing process is generally democratic, Cohen says. Everyone brings ideas, and the band expands on them. Dieterich writes a lot of the instrumental pieces. "Greg writes music when he's sleeping. He dreams about music then he wakes up and writes it down."
Although she had no musical experience before she joined the band in 1996, Matsuzaki might have the most control. "Satomi has final say over the vocals and kind of over everything. Satomi has the most opinions maybe. She's kind of like our editor. The rest of us are a little bit music nerdy. Satomi keeps us in check," he says. "Satomi makes sure we're not totally nerding out. And she has great music ideas too."
The band has already started working on its next album. This one will sound less like a live production than Apple O'—which was recorded in one day—because it will use more overdubs. Saunier says a lot of the music sounds like something out of the Cats musical.
"I feel like that would be a hot thing for people to emulate right now. I've been watching a lot of musicals. Everybody kind of winks at each other and there are a lot of levels of reality to them," he says. "Maybe you could say 'Deerhoof thinks it's the new frontier.'"
August 7, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 32
© 2003 Metro Pulse
| 
