- Paul Costuros
- Present-day Deerfhoof: Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, Satomi Matsuzaki, and Greg Saunier
On Friday, March 13, Deerhoof open for Of Montreal at Metro. The Bay Area band are still touring on their 12th album, La Isla Bonita (Polyvinyl), which came out last fall. Peter Margasak weighed in on it when Deerhoof played here in November: “They’ve found a sweet spot they can keep mining for exciting new forms of beauty,” he wrote. “The sugary, faux-naive vocal melodies of bassist Satomi Matsuzaki float within John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez’s polyphonic matrix of tricky post-Beefheart electric guitar, buoyed and buffeted by the heavy, limber grooves of drummer Greg Saunier.”
On their first album Deerhoof were a trio (Matsuzaki, Saunier, and guitarist Rob Fisk), but many of the core elements of their aesthetic had already taken shape. Matsuzaki’s cutesy singing has barely changed in 20 years, and neither have her simple, cryptic lyrics, which often feel slightly sinister because of what they don’t explain (and perhaps also because of my apparently involuntary distrust of cutesiness). The eccentric song structures and off-balance phrases are there too—the “bunny” part, for instance, alternates three bars of four with another grouping of three that has two beats tacked on at the end (in other words, 12 beats and 14 beats). And Saunier applies his long-limbed wild-man drumming, even at this early date, with remarkable restraint—he erupts only in fits and starts.
