Had you heard nothing of Deerhoof but their lovely new album, you might struggle to recognise the band who recorded it as the one on this stage.
Mountain Moves is an opalescent thing, a series of delicately formed avant-pop soap bubbles, more than half of which feature guest vocalists – Juana Molina and Laetitia Sadier among them. It is quite unlike its predecessors. But then you could say the same of many of those 13 earlier records, too.
Back to their core quartet, and with all vocals returned to the care of bassist Satomi Matsuzaki – who joined the band within days of arriving in San Francisco from Japan in 1995 – Deerhoof are their more familiar, unruly selves. Their origins lie in punkish experimentalism; live, they veer closer to powerpop, with its chunky riffs and sugary tunes. But it’s a Heath Robinson kind of powerpop; most of their music is so irregularly constructed that any resemblance to existing genres may be accidental.
Deerhoof look the way they sound: improbable, and charming. Guitarist John Dieterich and drummer Greg Saunier (the originator of intermittent, elliptical and very funny monologues) make indie-rock bookends for the tiny Matsuzaki, who when freed from her bass, dances with the instinctive, elementary verve of an unobserved child; and on quasi-lead guitar, the towering Ed Rodriguez is an aquamarine rock’n’roll Jesus in translucent tasselled sleeves. They clatter, scrawl and squiggle through their back catalogue as if racing one another to the end of each number.
I recognise only three of the new songs, and each one is a joy. Con Sordino kicks in like a cover of the Police’s Roxanne and turns out to be far more refreshing than that. I Will Spite Survive fizzes and sparkles; Come Down Here and Say That is transformed from its dreamy studio version into scratchy, choppy funk-rock.
Their concision is what separates them from, say, Primus. They are fun and they are frustrating. Nothing discordant lasts long enough to get tiresome, which it otherwise might. Melodies, for which they have a flair, scuttle past like mice making a break for the skirting board past outstretched claws. Playfulness is a conscious, insurrectionist act for them, the way it was for the dadaists or Paul Klee. They combine an absolute refusal to be serious about what they do with absolute commitment and sincerity in the doing of it.
