deerhoof
can someone explain deerhoof to me? seriously. pitchfork called them the best band in the world and i've heard nothing but stunning, 120-watt praise for their albums and live shows. i just don't get it. i thought they were horrendously awful when i saw them at intonation and, while i like their new LP runners four, i just can't see listening to it all the way through more than one more time. i don't hear melodies that catch me, arrangements that really groove or rock or basically anything that makes me want to hear any of their songs multiple times.
am i an idiot?
well, we know the answer to that. am i missing something here?
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i have mixed feelings about pitchfork. on the one hand, it's the best place to find out about new stuff, and there's plenty that i've learned about from there, but on the other, i find that the extreme ends of their scale are completely unreliable. cds they give like 9.0 and above to might be great, or they might be stunningly average or even bad. albums they give from 6 to 9 are generally worth considering. and then below 6 could actually be quite good, but you can't tell because low-rated albums rate the most obnoxious journalistic style they've got in their arsenal.
sometimes they're on the money. clap your hands say yeah and arcade fire are genuinely brilliant records, but i picked up luomo's vocal city, which got 9/10 and i think it's pretty average. same with the old deerhoof.
it's a love/hate thing.
exactly. i think when they have stuff they feel is middle- to upper-end stuff, it's not so bad, and often the writing is okay, but it's those top-end and bottom-end ones that get me the most because they're so self-conscious.
Back to deerhoof. I saw them yesterday at McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn, and they were pretty rocking, despite (a) the sound being crappy, and (b) the crowd being completely standoffish-new-york-fake-trying-to-be-too-cool. Actually the sound was better than other times I had been there. Anyway, I enjoy how deerhoof can in the same song thrash heartily, and break into melody, and back again, in a jagged, unexpected way. they played crisply, swinging from lull to beat to melody and back to thrash. It translated much better live then and record, because their albums can't show the energy. i was 50/50 about going, but since the show was free, I went, and was glad to see an amazing set
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