Deerhoof Goes Pop, But Stays Weird

Fringe ArtsNick Laugher — Published September 18, 2012

Granted, Breakup Song is bizarre, acid-mambo, glitch-driven pop music, but it’s still pop music.

After all, this is the band who once—allegedly—practiced in a kitchen drumming with chopsticks, singing through Walkman headphones and playing guitar through a fuzz pedal encased in papier maché. Why encase the pedal in papier maché, you may ask? Why the hell not?

It’s that reckless abandon that has always defined the Deerhoof sound, and continues to do so on what is one of the catchiest and weirdest selections of songs the eclectic ensemble has ever committed to record.

But why the paradigm shift to precocious, pretty pop music after an almost two-decade career of squelching noise rock?

“Lately, we’ve all been hanging out with a lot of accessible and poppy people,” admits guitarist Ed Rodriguez about the album. I sense that he may not be fully serious.

“We really wanted to have fun and put something out there to help other people enjoy themselves as well. We figured out the best way to have a great time would be to write an incredible album and get really famous and popular.

“Then we could help other people have fun by buying rounds of drinks from our massive royalty cheques,” he says, ever so glibly.

It’s things like Rodriguez’s blatant disregard for convention and his brutally dry sarcasm that make Deerhoof the volatile bundle of uncertainty and inscrutability that they are.

Continuing with the band’s mantra of meticulously self-producing their own albums, Breakup Song is laden with downtrodden mambo and glossed-up glitchy hooks. There’s an unsettling restlessness in the swarms of slimy latin grooves and bit-crushed bossa-nova shuffles, a hidden agenda of subversion in the mounds of marshmallow pop.

What’s purely natural for us sometimes comes across as crazy to others and they can’t imagine that we aren’t trying to be weird/confrontational/reactionary/controversial. We’re always just us. Love it or hate it, that’s how it’s going to be.” —Deerhoof Guitarist Ed Rodriguez

It’s those miniscule details that make a Deerhoof record what it is, and that’s something Rodriguez thinks working with a producer might compromise.

“We had approached Phil Spector, but he stabbed me in the neck,” he says, referencing the legendary incarcerated producer who invent the ‘Wall of Sound’ technique. “After I got out of the hospital we realized no one will really spend as much time agonizing about the details as we will. Although Spector does have a lot of time on his hands now.”

Though notoriously sassy and sarcastic, the man has a point. Rodriguez’s manner speaks volumes for the kind of band that Deerhoof are.

They’re not gunning for a certain aesthetic, and they’re not fine-tuning their sound to fit zeitgeist-ian expectations, they’re just a bunch of highly eccentric people making supremely challenging and influential music.

“It’s purely our personal desires to stay interested and excited, and get better, that’s how we can keep going and be so into it,” says Rodriguez. “The pressure from outside is usually not to be more creative but to stop exploring,” he clarifies.

“So many reviewers look back to a record they love and see us changing as a bad move. Too many ideas in one album or song. What’s purely natural for us sometimes comes across as crazy to others and they can’t imagine that we aren’t trying to be weird/confrontational/reactionary/controversial.

“We’re always just us. Love it or hate it, that’s how it’s going to be.”

Keep in mind, this album is following a severely wacky and spaced-out noise-rock opus, 2010’s Deerhoof vs. Evil, as well as a series of seven-inches where the band collaborated with different singers performing renditions of the songs from the album, including producer/rapper Busdriver.

“That series actually came about by a happy accident,” says Rodriguez. “Busdriver was going to work on a new unreleased Deerhoof track and [drummer] Greg Saunier accidentally sent an instrumental version of a song off the new album instead. Busdriver went to work and it ended up being really great, so that planted the idea to ask others to do the same thing.”

While churning out consciousness-contorting albums may be second nature to the group, they’re still relying on the uncertainty and, at some points, the sheer insanity of live performances to keep the band challenged and novel.

“We’re pretty aware of what we’re each good at and what’s possible, so that’s ingrained when we write a song,” he says. “But live is the Deerhoof experience taken up a notch, to the last notch of your notches. Splashes of sweat. Feelings of floating. Uncontrollable smiling and collective joy. Lots of camera phone flashes.”

Deerhoof / Sept. 19 / Cabaret du Mile End – Salle Ubisoft (5240 Parc Ave.) / $20.00 / 8:00 p.m.