by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
I haven’t had time to catch a good show since the clock hit 2007. All of that changed drastically in the past two weeks. Right after Valentine’s Day I took my lady friend out to see Old Crow Medicine Show at the Florida Theatre. Old Crow is an easy bet when you want to have a good time, because no one is capable of disliking them. They are funny, up-tempo, talented, and a great old-time string band. But as good of a band as Old Crow is, I was still hungry for something new.
I needed music that would change my mind. Rock music like I’ve never heard before. I needed some chemically imbalanced band that confused and bewildered me with their cadence, time signatures, and eccentric musical genre-contortions. So when an old friend came to town and suggested we catch Deerhoof at Jack Rabbits, I shrugged and said okay.
This particular bill at Jack Rabbits, featuring Sensei, Busdriver, and Deerhoof, was certain to be an interesting show at the very least. Sensei is the new incarnation of some of the members of the local pop-punk outfit Inspection 12. In spite of lead singer Mark O’Quinn’s impressive handlebar mustache, Sensei left me wanting. It isn’t that Sensei was bad, their set was tight and their showmanship was top-notch, but their songwriting needs to move into something new. The melody-driven songs were trite and the structures were predictable.
Following Sensei was Busdriver. The transition from a five-piece rock band to a man alone on stage is strange, but Busdriver seemed the most comfortable up there. When he started I was thoroughly annoyed by his tedious beats and repetitious choruses, so I tried to delve into conversations that would distract me and drown my attention in Yeungling. Then suddenly I would accidentally pay attention and there was some brilliance to the concoctions Busdriver was performing. They were intermittent, and perhaps he was ashamed of the pop sensibility of some of these jams, because they were buried deep within his set, but they were truly brilliant for that glimmer of a moment that he allowed himself to not be as avant-garde as he could manage. Although most of his set sounded like the Fresh Prince performing with Applied Communications, the songs were rich with blips and samples and with lyrics that don’t necessarily form coherent thoughts (so they must be deep), there were moments that reminded me more of Del the Funky Homosapien or Tribe Called Quest.
When Deerhoof took the stage there was nothing visually impressive about them. They sauntered up there unassuming. A small Asian girl (Satomi Matsuzaki) picked up the bass and checked the mic. A bean-pole of a kid carried his guitar up on stage and fiddled with his amplifier (John Dieterich), and then the drummer (Greg Saunier) came on stage and stuck his face between Matsuzaki and her microphone to casually thank us for being there. When the rock struck, I thought at first there had been some sort of accident. Saunier cranked down on the drums in a way that sounded like the chaos of trashcans tumbling down a set of stairs, but meticulously controlled.
Matsuzaki’s vocals are airy and create a discordance that is at first obnoxious, then eventually just unusual, and then finally almost cute. The vocals unseat you enough to not be surprised by the strange construction of Deerhoof’s songs. Every time you start to think that perhaps Dieterich has gotten lost and the drummer is pounding on regardless, they suddenly snap into an AC/DC-like riff that just attacks. The songs bleed into one another, or perhaps they are single songs with so many disparate parts that you can’t connect them mentally, but either way it’s like nothing I had ever heard before and it really rocked.
Guitarist John Dieterich and drummer Greg Saunier are lucky to have found each other. Saunier came across as almost mentally disabled, not because of his pulverizing drums and chemically imbalanced style on the skins, but because his impulsive tendency to leap from the drum stool between songs to talk into Matsuzaki’s mic, then leaping back behind his drums and leaning in hard as he pounded out another frantic and disarming beat. I can’t fathom how he keeps track of where they are in the song, but somehow he and Dieterich know exactly when it is time to change. Whether they are counting to some near-infinite number or have a telepathic link, I’m not certain how they communicate, but they know exactly what they are doing. No other drummer would have any idea how to play to Dieterich’s strange and dissonant guitar style, and likewise no other guitarist could understand Saunier’s rythms, so the two are a match made in heaven. Oddly enough, Matsuzaki’s obscure vocals and solid bass playing are the thing that ties the band together and makes it all make sense, although by itself, her voice and ability on the bass would not stand out in the least.
If you are hungry for a new kind of music, give Deerhoof a try. You certainly haven’t heard anything like it before, but it doesn’t go so way out that you have to pretend to like it to be cool. It really is skilled and meticulously performed rock. If you can’t see them live the first time you hear them (they are in the Carolina’s and Virginia this weekend if you are up for the road trip) then I am told Apple’O is the album to get you started.
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