Deerhoof
have, it seems, now been operating out of San Francisco's DIY/ lo-fi
scene for some fifteen years. For the press release for their latest album, founder member
Greg Saunier spoke of their beginnings “locked in the basement
trying to figure out how our clashing personalities and ideas could
turn into a band.” Wikipedia describes the result as an “erratic style veer[ing] between pop,
noise, rock and roll, and avant garde”.
And
indeed, seeing the various band members on stage, they're about as
motley an array as the Cravats or the Men They Couldn't Hang. Perhaps most out-of-place of all is
bassist Ed Rodriguez who, with his rock star locks, could even be in
some sort of a band.
I once compared the sound of the Brighton band the Sticks to the lineof a fuzzy soft B pencil. From the same analogy Deerhoof
would be a bright crayon drawing. Though there's changes and
counter-melodies aplenty there's an appealing absence of depth
- whatever happens in their music happens on the surface. Which is
underlined by... well, by their line. They stand
alongside one another on stage, no-one – not even the drummer –
pushed to the back of the line-up.
The
one time I saw them before (now some years ago), singer Satomi
Matsuzaki spoke so little English Saunier kept having to run from
behind the drum kit whenever something needed to be said. And that
sort of restriction seemed to sum up their sound, like they were
simply doing what they could be doing. This time her English has
improved enough for her to orchestrate the audience in an elaborate
singalong for the encore. And musically things are similar.
Instrumental breaks stray in which, however inventive, can veer
towards the muso-ish.
Much
in music for me comes back to Simon Reynolds' comment about the
Slits, that they got better when they got better.
And me thinking getting better didn't make them any better at all,
that they were at their best when they didn't even know how many
rules they were breaking. Taking these two gigs as samples, Deerhoof
have got better. Their bright crayon drawing has
seen some scale and perspective creep in, and it loses some of its
impact.
And
they're clearly keen to keep their sense of the absurd. Not only were
we treated to Matsuzaki's singalong, Saunier would interrupt
proceedings for spoken word pieces. Affecting angsty earnestness,
dropping dramatic pauses, he'd regale us with tales of suitcases
being lost to the English weather and other such non-events.
If
you like this, one number from London...
...try
two tracks from Rotterdam. (Yes, the vid seems to be labelled 'part
one' without there being a part two. Like I say, a sense of the
absurd.)
…actually my Isle of Wight holiday was a few years ago, but only uploading the photos now for reasons varied and uninteresting. More to follow. As ever, full set on Flickr…
Well there does seem to be an inexhaustible, ever-replenishing supply of the stuff. This bunch is mostly taken around the Old Market and Circus Street area of Brighton. As ever, full set on Flickr...
Tagged by Wikipedia as “indie folk”, Sun Kil Moon first garnered
my interest through a live YouTube video of 'Richard Ramirez
Died Today of Natural Causes'. (Though why I'd take to a
song about “getting older stuff” I can't imagine.) And to cut to
the chase, I emerged from the gig clutching one of their their CDs.
(Their most recent release seemed not to be on sale, but then
apparantly I got the very last item of their stock - 'Benji).
So this will be yet another time where we see-saw between gig and CD
review...
Effectively
frontman/ songwriter Mark Kozolek and whoever is playing with him,
Sun Kil Moon might fit into the 'illustrated lyrics' form of folk.
With Kozolek's unflamboyant voice and sparse instrumentation, the
'words first' combination is at times reminiscent of Leonard Cohen,
the strumming flamenco sound of 'Truck Driver' not
so far from 'Stranger Song'. And yet despite this,
while Cohen's lyrics are full of metaphor and allusion Kozolek's
words are direct and unadorned, unphilosophical and sometimes
inelegant. They can sound like one-way conversations which merely
happen to fall into song form.
This
is often reinforced in the words, which recount letters and phone
calls, sometimes giving dates or flight times, or in subject matters
which stray discursively. It can even become metafictionally
self-reflective, the line “I needed one more track to finish up my
record” appearing on – yes – the last track of the record.
Music itself is often referenced, with characters described by their
record collection and tracks called things like 'I Watched
The Film The Song Remains The Same'.
Except,
and you may well be ahead of me here, the apparent casualness often
masks a sharp precision. It can seem so immediate, so unmediated that
surely anyone could get up and do it. Yet at the same time Kozolek clearly knows what he's up to. For example on 'Micheline'
when he sings...
“Her
brain worked a little slower than the others
And
she wore thick-rimmed glasses
She
took a different bus to school
And
was in differnet kind of classes”
...it
evokes the vague, slightly euphemistic way those with learning
difficulties were spoken of in his (and for that matter, my) youth.
They were intended to be met by a knowing silence, or a quick shift
onto another subject. Perhaps peculiarly, its often the sheer
simplicity of the phrases which make them so readily memorable.
They've certainly continued to ring round in my head.
And
in fact the collective hive mind states that Kozolek, who's now been
making music for nigh-on a quarter century, once wrote in a more
flowery style, but has in his more mature years pruned his garden
back. Which kind of makes sense. Writing so directly is like taking
to the high wire without a safety net, something only the most
accomplished can manage. (Certainly its as a writer that Kozolek
excels. A cover of 'Send in the Clowns' is a rare
miss-step in the gig.)
And
the music matches this. Though it's simple enough for him to
repeatedly tease his band about the low number of chords in each
track, its simplicity is simultaneously deceptive. It doesn't do
much, it does the right thing. The pace of tracks is normally sedate,
if not quite funereal then funereal's slightly sprightlier brother.
Though as they proceed they can boil up to an intensity. But – and
you're probably ahead of me here as well – its putting the words
and music together which makes the songs potent, the laconic
descriptions vieing with the catchy melodies.
Of
course a common weakness of folk songwriting is pat philosophising.
But, when composed this way, songs raise questions only to pass them
onto us. 'Jim Wise' is no call-to-arms protest
song, just the flat assertion that a harmless old guy “will be
headed to Mansfield prison by the end of the year for sure”. But
the haunting harmonies and melodies reframe things, to the point
where the cold hard fact doesn't just settle in our minds.
When on
'Carissa', singing of a tragic accident that took
his cousin's life, he comments all he can do is to write a song “to
make some sense of this/ To find a deeper meaning in this senseless
tragedy”. Yet its built into the very same song that this just
can't be done. He sings “you don't just raise two kids, take out
your trash and die”, describing exactly what has happened. As he's commented “I don’t know what the meaning is but
I’m compelled to write about these people, to pay tribute to them.”
While he chats to the audience between numbers, when singing he's
often not even facing us, as if in a reverie.
Perhaps
the biggest clue to Kozolek's songwriting comes at the end of the
main set when he fell into a spoken word section looking back over
the tour, reflectively crossing cities but returning to his waking up
in a Brighton hotel that morning and hearing the seagulls. Its not
like there's some epiphany that he had back in the hotel room which
he's now using the medium of song to extract and translate to us,
it's the experience of hearing the segulls itself he's evoking. As Kozolek himself has said: “Place is important. What I’m
surrounded by is a good place to start in any song.”
Except
the songs are as often about people as places. With the high number
of songs set back in his native Ohio, people and place often overlap
– each needing mapping as much as the other. There's only three
songs on 'Benji' not named after people and only
one, 'Pray For Newtown', which isn't about a
person or string of people he personally knows. (And even that, in
his own words, is about “women and children and moms and dads and
brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts”.) And a whole lot of
those people are dead or close to dying. Reviewing 'Benji' for the Guardian, Kitty Empire pointed out its
“high body count”. The uncle merely being sent to jail could even
be one of the lucky ones.
As
part of Kozolek's discursive style there's a jumbled quality, as if
he's simply recounting things as they occur to him. Album opener
'Carissa' comments how her death cruelly echoes an
earlier fatal family accident, but that doesn't get it's own track
('Truck Driver') until later. A similar
non-linearity occurs within songs, with couplets like “at 55
Richard Ramirez died/ But in '83 he was very much alive”. This
maintains the free-flowing semi stream-of-consciousness style of the
writing. But, as ever, there's a function behind the form. It's just
that we're primed to seeing a purpose behind time juxtapositions when
Vonnegut formalises them into a science fiction novel, but less so
when Kozolek puts them in a folk song.
Ramirez
was the Night Stalker serial killer, referred to here by his
demythologising real name like Lennon calling Dylan “Zimmerman”
on 'God'. News items about his spree once spiked
Kozolek's childhood fears. Yet his death just marks the passing of
one conception of death for another. As a child you fear death as
some bogyeman coming through your bedroom window at night, complete
with Scooby Doo mask and catchy name. But the death you see as an
adult comes like the night itself; you watch the shadows growing
longer, knowing nothing's going to be rolling them back.
Except,
and you may also be ahead of me here, there's a fair amount of humour
amid all the melancholy. A couple of tracks are positively jaunty –
the goofily cheery 'I Love My Dad' is part-way to
Jonathan Richman, while the almost Euro-poppy album closer 'Ben's
My Friend' recounts a “meltdown passed”, a personal
crisis from the perspective of it being over. (It is I think about
being able to recall the events and even the triggers of the crisis,
but not think yourself back into the feeling of it once its left
you.) There's humour along the way, some of it self-depreciating,he
exults in recounting how he was told by a friend "who do you
think you are, Mick fucking Jagger?"
Live
the butter-side-up chiefly came up in the encore, which he devoted to
audience requests. Forgetting the lyrics to a song half-way through,
he persuaded an audience member to get them up on his smartphone and
hold it for him as he sang. Their rapport established, he them got
the same guy to duet with him on 'I Got You Babe'.
(In these days of the instant record it's been YouTubed. Though presumably on someone else's smartphone.)
Overall,
its an experience well suited to the low-key setting of St George's
Church, with no stage set whatsoever. And while Rozolek complained (I
think ironically) about the minimal lighting, which definitely put
the moon in the band name, it added to the ambience. However, tracks
that are quite distinct on record end up vaguely similar live.
(Presumably through all having to share the same instrumentation.)
Combined with this, at two-and-a-half hours the gig was maybe a shade
too long. (And yes, I am an awkward bugger who normally complains
that gigs are too short!)
At
one point Kozolek insists “I'm telling the truth and if you don't
believe it...”, before referencing a book we can check out. We're
used to authenticity only being confused with aesthetics, that when
people ask whether Lou Reed wrote 'Heroin'
autobiographically they're really missing the point. But here there's
an inescapable sense that his songs need to be based in truth for
them to work. (“Based in truth” of course doesn't mean
exactitude; when I read he'd changed the girl's names in his history
of adolescent fumblings on 'Dogs' I was relieved
more than anything else.)
A
gig which feels unmediated and uncensored feels fresh and arresting.
As Kitty Empire has said “Kozelek... has nothing left to
hide, or lose: the effect is utterly riveting.” And while the
personal nature of the songs enchances them it reacts with their free
flowning form and can at times veer towards that dread folk
songwriter word 'confessional' – something which often stands for
sheer exhibitionism. Not pausing to put his mouth into gear led to this infamous incident, a sorry tale which doesn't do Kozelek
any favours.
Perhaps
the overall question is when does a song tip over and lose any
connection to the general, when past traumas become prize
possessions, for parading not for sharing. After all, if the listener
can't relate there's not much point in the audience being there. This Pitchfork review suggests some of his previous writing fell
the wrong side of this line, but he's since hauled himself over.
Notably, the not-on-sale new album is called 'Universal
Themes'.
'Truck
Driver' live from Paris last year...
...and
that live video of 'Richard Ramirez' I first
watched...
