Deerhoof can’t be stopped, nor should they be. Nearly thirty years into their career and each successive release is still met with cheerful yelps of “wow, this could be their best album yet.” Their idiosyncratic approach to art rock, noise pop, or whatever-other-genre-tag-that-doesn’t-entirely-fit, shimmers in the face of stagnancy. Their astounding albums each have a sense of impossibility to them, feeling both out of time and timeless. They are kind of peerless. The band - Satomi Matsuzaki, Greg Saunier, John Dieterich, and Ed Rodriguez - thrive on creativity and unpredictability, driven by a constant notion of reflexive innovation, pushing beyond what came before to arrive somewhere familiar but ultimately new. It’s often the road less traveled for Deerhoof, shifting and revolving their approach with an adventurous spirit that comes from a place of excitement and musical unity. They are sparked by the power of imagination, picturing a better world and doing their part to bring the rest of us along. This is what Miracle-Level, the band’s nineteenth album is about, focusing on the daily miracles of life, the small details, attempting to see the beauty of human life that operates in resistance to corporate control, war, and hatred. Evil is offset with love. Miracles of kindness abound.
With the idea that comfort is complacency, Deerhoof wandered outside their personal comfort zone during the album’s creation, opting to record the album in a proper studio with an outside producer in its entirety for their first time to date. It’s not as though they’ve never been in a studio, it’s more so that the band have always had autonomous control on what they’ve created, working together over the years to shape and define their records, an endless ability to tinker to fine-tune as they see fit. With studio time booked and an engineer at the helm, it forced the recordings to a finite timeframe and put trust in producer Mike Bridavsky to capture their paean to all things miraculous. Together at No Fun Club in Winnipeg, they used the studio setting to capture the band with minimalist production aesthetics, creating a record that feels relatively sparse, peeling back the density.
To create an album rooted in miracles and resounding joy, Deerhoof vocalist Matsuzaki made the conscious decision to eschew the language of “the world’s policeman,” instead writing and performing her lyrics entirely in her native Japanese. It’s a gorgeous change of pace, a beautiful tribute to her heritage that retains the magical sense of whimsy inherent in her words (the liner notes come with a complete translation). There are songs about appreciating the finer things in life such as music, cats, figurative space travel (“My Lovely Cat!”, “Everybody, Marvel”), “high-level” love songs (“Miracle-Level”), and even a self referential song that would appear to contain the lyric “doesn’t this song sound different from usual Deerhoof? I want to sway side-to-side a little” (The Little Maker). Matsuzaki continues to be a beacon of light, aware of the daily struggles that face the world, but aiming her focus elsewhere in revolt.
While it may not be “business as usual” for the band, the sound is purely unfiltered Deerhoof, a rare opportunity for them to focus solely on the songs themselves. The results are both gorgeous and chaotic. Miracle-Level is an incredibly dynamic album, even by Deerhoof standards, nuanced with soft tones and a skeletal clarity. Rather than a full out onslaught of sensory overload, the band take an avant-garde approach to the proceedings, skittering between melodic grace, gentle landscapes, and bombastic glory. Their signature combustibility is still firmly in place, but they’ve constructed the record with a lulling quality, the tangled explosions of disjointed groove and sonic force are paired together with engaged sentiment and a feeling of ease. They bounce between brilliant punk, both mesmerizing (“Momentary Art of Soul!”) and wonky (“Sit Down, Let Me Tell You A Story”) in a way that only Deerhoof can, but they’ve also focused on vulnerability (“Wedding, March, Flower”), dreamy attention to detail (“The Poignant Melody”), and sultry lounge soul (“The Little Maker”). Together it’s an album that weaves magic with every transition, a winding path deep into the nature of miracles.