by Brett Williams (@brettlesboy)
For nearly thirty years Deerhoof has been writing the noise rock agenda. From the explosive improvised jams of their early days to the danceable, jittery pop and proggy, avant-garde experiments of the last decade and a half, Greg Saunier, Satomi Matsuzaki, and company have been pushing their own limits and the limits of what it means to make music on your own artistic terms. Today the band remains unabashedly progressive, ambitious, exciting, and, most importantly, weird. Divine Schism is the group’s first fully self-released album, and in the wake of last year’s decision to pull all of their music from Spotify, another step in their conscious move away from the Music Industry (whatever that is).
Though most of Deerhoof’s music remains on other streaming services, Divine Schism is only available on Bandcamp and as a limited physical release on the band’s tour. The album, a science-fiction story about a cabal of tech oligarchs who install mirrors around the Earth to protect it from the Sun rather than cut emissions, continues the group’s aforementioned foray into the avant-garde and conceptual, narrative-driven work. The band utilizes a blend of old tricks and new sounds to explore the complex and tragic mother/son relationship between the Sun and her favorite child.
Despite their “non-commercial” ethos and approach to their songwriting, Deerhoof’s music has always been full of strong hooks, catchy riffs and hummable melodies that disappear too suddenly or are overtaken by abrupt transitions. On Divine Schism’s opening suite, the thirteen minute “Sun Like It Hot,” the band guides you gently through their whirlwind of ideas as a consistent, restrained mid-tempo groove underlays a stream of evolving musical figures and mantras delivered in Matsuzaki’s sprightly voice.
Saunier takes over vocal duties for a number of tracks, narrating spoken-word passages over spooky, atonal passages of ambient synth. The presence of so many of these quiet, haunting movements make the heavier tunes stand out as even more volatile than they might otherwise seem. Saunier’s drumming on “Let Us Out” sounds as much like uptempo bebop as it does a heavy-metal blastbeat. But ultimately, very few of the tracks stand out, because Divine Schism shouldn’t be heard or discussed on a track-by-track basis.
Most bands - even the weirder ones - start off with their fingers on the pulse and start to lose it after five, ten, twenty years. But you can’t really lose the pulse if you’ve been actively avoiding it your entire career, and that’s the kind of band Deerhoof has always been and remains today. They don’t have any paths to follow - only new roads to pave.