For the better part of the past decade, despite membership swaps and record label shifts, the San Francisco quartet Deerhoof were an album-a-year kind of band: 2003's Apple O' followed 2002's Reveille, while 2004's breakthrough Milk Man was chased not only by The Runners Four but also the strong, seven-song EP Green Cosmos. Deerhoof were a busy band making some of the world's busiest art-rock — a splintery mix of excised prog, rippling pop and finessed punk, all surfaced by the playful wonder of Satomi Matsuzaki's voice.
Aggressive but adorable, intricate but addictive, the seven Deerhoof LPs released between 2001 and 2008 offered rewards for diligent listeners. Sure, while Matsuzaki's nursery-rhyme cadence and John Dieterich's shifty, sharp guitar lines often felt immediately interesting, Deerhoof made the sort of deliberate albums where the details needed to be teased out. The melody of "Spirit Ditties of No One" might have been immediately lovable, for instance, but how about the reference to Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or the way Greg Saunier's suspended drum patter swiveled around the notes of Dieterich's guitar hook? Those might have taken a while to catch, especially since that song was only the eighth of 20 on 2005's The Runners Four. Despite how wiry and kinetic their music could be, Deerhoof demanded you sit still and listen — again and again.
But in 2009, Deerhoof didn't follow up 2008's Offend Maggie as trends would have predicted; ditto 2010. Finally, last month, the band released Deerhoof vs. Evil, its 10th LP after the longest release-gap of its productive career. Deerhoof's lapse in annual output actually couldn't have come at a better time. The band was founded in 1994, though the release stream took a while to start, and in that 17-year run, music production — how it's made by bands, how it's released to customers — has changed drastically. Arduous analog processes are now expedited in digital-rich studios that seem more like spaceships. Essentially, bands can make more music for less money and less time. The same shift is mirrored in how music eventually finds its fans. During Deerhoof's career, compact discs not only have fallen out of favor, but vinyl records, cassettes and simple digital distribution — post a song online, and just let people have it — have all either returned or risen to prominence. Vinyl is expensive while downloads are cheap, sure, but the point is a unified one: The ways people can make and deliver their music have metastasized, even since Deerhoof last struck with Offend Maggie.
Bands have taken advantage of these new options, recording and releasing music — especially in the loosely defined realm of indie rock — at an overwhelming pace. It all has an eventual champion. From Tennis and TV Girl to Black Lips and Best Coast, twice a week, it seems, another MP3 blog is declaring another new band with a four-song demo, recorded at home and posted to the website Bandcamp, as the possible best new band in the world.
That's why Deerhoof vs. Evil's arrival last month feels so well-timed: Maybe more than any previous LP, it seems like the sort of record that people will still be parsing when the Best of 2011 lists have all been filed. From an opener sung in the Romance language Catalan, to a tune that sounds like Blondie as scored by Konono No. 1, vs. Evil pushes past not only the expectations of Deerhoof but also, in a market dominated by bedroom pop devoid of craft, indie rock right now. It's restless music that, at least for 33 minutes, makes listening to music in 2011 feel not quite as restless.
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