461 words about the new deerhoof album

jotted in my notes app while walking around my neighborhood at dusk

It is the charred & ruined chassis of a crashed car engulfed in flames, and then a demonic merry-go-round; it is 3am at a sweaty bushwick rave in 2008, and it is the memory of a bartók string quartet in a drug-induced stupor in the ICU; it is the dark circus of western imperialism; there are organs, bowed cymbals, vibraphones, fragments of 1920s modernism, are those woodwinds? it is a pulse—present, insistent, then hidden; “one more to go,” she sings, and now it’s a mahler symphony transcribed for a 1980s metal band; there are tweaky guitars, pointillistic and nerve-wracked, and basses pitch-shifted up seven octaves; “I am pinocchio / share the same story,” finally, a bass pulses eighth notes over a breakbeat and descending altered chords - then a shard of neobaroque counterpoint, vocalise skating over an icy electric guitar

(I am listening under a mottled collection of grayish clouds)

then a limping gesture five-one, five-one, five-one undergirds digital & distorted chaos / before the sound of waves and distant thunder / a brief interlude, ah okay yes, the record began, I now realize, with nature sounds; is this the midpoint, an allusion to symmetry?

now: militaristic math rock, sneering, jingoistic trumpet salutes (but played on guitar), then they begin to smear, the harmony twists, the drums come apart, grow wild; I don’t know what she is singing and it doesn’t matter; the trumpet salutes return, an organ enters, dense clusters of notes supporting the repeated word “adrift” as the trumpets are smashed by an anvil; here is—I think maybe?—a stereo drum machine; “this meeting is called to order” she says…. a cloud of insects, terrible and insistent, harmony emerges, it could be a fusion record from the 1970s; now she is intoning something: “think emerald, think Vatican, a city within a city;” the insectile cloud, terrifying, reappears;

here is a battered saxophone under a gritty bass; here are snarling guitar lines that wouldn’t be out of place in a metal anthem; s y n t h e s i s ; toward the end of the penultimate track, a symphony orchestra enters, a series of pompous cadences, applause, an opera singer; all of western music collapsed into a few seconds of disintegration and deflation; the last tune is called “immigrant songs” and in it she sings: “I was the driver of the guests to your party; I was the baker of sweets for your party…” and later “all of the tune you wanted to hear / happy to you / depressing to me” — the record ends with a three minute coda of almost pure noise; it is exhilarating and sad and triumphant and a cry that I feel as pleasure and pain in my lungs and in my bones; wild wild catharsis;;;

listen & purchase (it’s incredible)

I’m working on an essay about Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. On June 3rd, I’ll be in conversation with

Ross Barkan

, talking about his sprawling and deeply moving NYC epic, Glass Century, at Literary Arts Bookstore in Portland, OR. As always, if you enjoy this newsletter, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Thank you for reading!