Review: Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs Evil

Despite their instantly recognisible and inimitable sound, Deerhoof have always found a way to evolve with each release. But on 2008's Offend Maggie it felt for the first time like they were stagnating; perhaps it was to ease new guitarist Ed Rodriguez into the fold, but after the expansive textures of 2007's Friend Opportunity, Offend Maggie seemed like a retreat to the more straight-faced guitar-orientated rock of their 2005 magnum opus The Runners Four. Not that Offend Maggie was anything less than an excellent record, it just felt like an unexpected about-face after Friend Opportunity had presented so many possibilities.

Now that Rodriguez seems fully integrated into the band (as exhibited by their tremendously fun live shows), tenth record Deerhoof vs Evil sees the band's creative cogs in full motion once more. Following on from the three most accessible records of the band's career, Deerhoof vs Evil is as schizoid as anything they've done in recent memory; even a song as irrepressible as Super Duper Rescue Heads! can't help but descend into chaos in its final twenty seconds. The galavanting instrumental Let's Dance The Jet, with its scorched organ and gnashing guitar riff, is about as straightforward as it gets on this album, and even that's a bizzare cover version from some Greek film soundtrack.

That should give some indication of the range of ideas going on in Deerhoof vs Evil. The ear-popping opener Qui Dorm, Només Somia is awash with dubby blips and guitars and sung entirely in Spanish, whilst the fluid flamenco guitars on Noone Asked Me To Dance provide the perfect backdrop for Satomi Matsuzaki's feather-weight vocals. The Merry Barracks lurches from side to side with a five-note motif that cascades from speaker to speaker over the kind of snorting blues riff Jack White would be proud of. Then there's the disorientating tropical swirl of Must Fight Current in which Satomi threatens "I'm going to sue you" whilst guitarist John Dieterich mutters eerily in the background. And that's all within the album's first seven songs.

One glance at the lyric sheet will, as ever, cause considerable bemusement; Satomi opens Secret Mobilization by informing us "this is not based on a true story", as if the tales on this album could have any semblance of reality. The "evil" implied by the album's title might be gauged by the goings-on in I Did Crimes For You; over a procession of handclaps and ominous keyboards, Satomi monotonically tells us "this is a stick-up / smash the windows" in what sounds like the most perverse hold-up since the opening scene of The Dark Knight.

Things peter off in the album's latter third - Hey I Can is Deerhoof-by-numbers and the tuneless C'moon never gets off the ground - leaving vs Evil just shy of  top-drawer Deerhoof. But the album is confirmation if necessary that ten albums in, Deerhoof's ability to confound and surprise remains undiminished.

82/100

Listen to the Esben & The Witch debut here!

Violet Cries, the debut record from hotly tipped Brighton trio Esben & The Witch comes out on Matador Records next Monday, but you can listen to it in full here. It's a bit of a stonker too; hyped-british-band-in-actually-rather-good album shocker!

Review: Gang Of Four - Content

Keep It Like A Secret circa 2011 is beginning to read like it's 1979 again. Just two weeks after Wire's rather fine Red Barked Tree comes Content, Gang of Four's first album of new material since 1995's Shrinkwrapped. The album title - which refers to the role of TV scheduling as a filler for the space between advertising - certainly befits the band that released the seminal Entertainment! And on the face of it, this sounds like the same band too; Andy Gill still fires metallic shards from his guitar, the dub-funk basslines (now courtesy of Thomas McNeice in place of Dave Allen) are present and correct, and Jon King still seems like a man with something to say.

And yet right from the first track, things just don't feel quite right. The nervous energy that seethes through She Said "You Made A Thing Of Me" feels forced; over a reverberating guitar line and a pulsing rhythm, King's overly desperate vocals sound like someone trying to prove something to himself, namely whether he can justify Gang Of Four's continued existence. And so it goes for Content in general, it's a little short of, well, content; the outer shell of GoF is there but the essence of the band is conspicuously absent (the band did always say that  "essence" was rare, after all).

With the best of GoF's work, Gill's jarring guitar lines and syncopations dictated the band's jerking and oddly danceable rhythms. The same applies to Content, on the pounding stomps of You Don't Have To Be Mad and You'll Never Pay For the Farm, or the reflective A Fruitfly In The Beehive. But all too often, Gill's fretwork feels like a signature piece, consigning him to rip it up in the opening seconds of a song, before new-boys McNeice and drummer Mark Heaney lay down a beat that never goes beyond serviceable. Somewhere far away, ousted drummer Hugo Burnham must be laughing away to himself.

On my review of Wire's Red Barked Tree, I remarked on how in touch Wire were with their former selves. In hindsight, I may have underestimated just what an asset that is to a band of such venerability.  The album is blighted by its laboured production - for all its apparent bluster and energy, the final product is oddly subdued - but even taking that aside, Content is the sound of a band desperately trying to rediscover  themselves. Does Content justify Gang of Four's existence? Just about; it's not a bad album by any means, better even than many might have expected after all these years. But equally, it's difficult to see just where the band go from here.

60/100

Life After Brent for Menomena?

The recent news of Brent Knopf's departure from Portland, Oregon trio Menomena really knocked me for six. It's not that the news was so surprising - last year's Mines was a troubled birth to say the least, with the three members reportedly at each others throats - it's just that Menomena seemed like one of those bands that would either exist as their original trio or not at all. Whilst the remaining two members Danny Seim and Justin Harris have pledged to carry on (and seem pretty confident in their ability to do so, judging by this article), it's hard to imagine Menomena minus Knopf. As a trio, each member formed an integral part of the band; all three members contributed to the songwriting, shared singing duties across each record and played an array of instruments both live and on record. One only needs to look at Knopf's fine work with side-project Ramona Falls to see just how much he brought to Menomena.

Menomena easily rank amongst my favourite bands to emerge in the last 5-10 years. They're certainly one of the most underrated, one of those bands that so frequently garner praise yet are conspicuous only by their absence come the end-of-year lists. They seemed to arrive fully-formed too, with 2003's I Am The Fun Blame Monster (a clever anagram of The First Menomena Album), an album which showcased the band's way with meticulous arrangements and crystal-clear production which, as with all subsequent releases, was put together with "Deeler", a computer program written by Knopf no less. That album also showed off Menomena's creative flair with album packaging, containing a flickbook which decoded the anagram and showed the three guys playing their instruments; 2007's Friend & Foe featured multiple album covers comprising a plethora of comic beasties, cut so that rotating the underlying CD changed the image, giving near endless possibilities. They're not averse from taking a risk too; as early as album #2, they were composing  20-minute instrumental suites made to accompany a performance by a local dance troupe. But most importantly Menomena were making great music, music entirely unique to them.

Good luck to Danny and Justin; let's not forget they're extremely talented guys and I'm sure they can still do  the Menomena name justice. As for Brent, I'm sure he'll be just fine.

Spotlight Artist - Lady Lazarus

Lady Lazarus is the alias of Savannah, Georgia-based Melissa Ann Sweat. Her self-released debut album Mantic is out now. For fans of Grouper, her hazy and sedate, yet enchanting songs should connect. Here's the suitably hypnotising video to Sick Child.

The Problem Of Leisure, What To Do For Pleasure?

I have been reading a fair amount of negativity on the subject of Gang of Four and their allowance of the song Natural's Not In It to be used in an X-box Kinect Sports commercial. "Sell-outs!" is the general cry. How could a band that wrote such insightful songs on the evils of consumerism (Cheeseburger, Natural's Not In It), the media's biased and desensitising handling of world issues (I Found That Essence Rare, 5:45), on the failings of capitalism (erm...Capital, It Fails Us Now), a band whose very name invokes the heart of Chinese communism of the 60's and 70's endorse that most consumerist of products, the X-box? Get over it, I say. These people seem to neglect the fact that when the band released their seminal debut LP Entertainment!, they were signed to EMI. Their later records were released on Warner Bros.

Hypocrisy? Not really. In Paul Lester's biography Damaged Gods, Andy Gill makes it quite clear that the band never set out to be heroes of the self-righteous variety: "It would have been easy to wave a red flag, to adopt a stance, to put one foot on the monitors and man the barricades...but we don't feel that's accurate". He continues: "A lot of the time we're describing ourselves as being WITH the enemy. We're complicit. We're collaborators. It's not a straightforward world, that's what we think". In an article in today's Sunday Times, Jon King remarks on the raised eyebrows on the whole X-box commercial affair: "I'm not going to apologise for doing what we need to do to get by." And that captures the true essence of GoFs lyrics; as people, they're as flawed as you and me, as the system that governs them, it's just that they're able to recognise those flaws in themselves. Whilst I deeply admire the bold ethics of many of the bands to whom GoF were a benefactor (Fugazi, the Minutemen), it was never what GoF were about. Their music provided (and still provides) an accurate socio-political commentary; it's not a statement of intent.

On the 24th, Gang of Four release Content, their first album of new material in some 16 years. My initial scepticism has been curbed somewhat by catching half a new track on the radio the other day. It sounded pretty good actually, like a more muscular version of the band that recorded Entertainment! and Solid Gold. It reminded me of how Mission Of Burma sounded on their reunion, a band which, sonically least, had more than a little in common with GoF. Whether that's a reflection of the album as a whole, I couldn't say, but I will continue to assess GoF on what really counts, their music.

Review: Wire - Red Barked Tree

In their earler days, Wire were famed, notorious even, for their restless creativity and for never looking back; live performances routinely comprised yet-to-be released material, often to the frustration of attendees. It was this insatiable thirst that led to that initial run of Pink Flag-Chairs Missing-154, one of the greatest and most influential hot-streaks of all time. Their sporadic reunions were always based on the admirable criteria that the band had something new to offer, from their more electronic offerings of the 80s to the agressive, thrashy sound of their Read & Burn material of the early-00's. But having become a more on-going concern in recent years (and with Bruce Gilbert no longer in their ranks) has seen age finally catch up with the band, and a more reminiscing side of Wire emerge.

Which is not to say that Red Barked Tree, their twelfth LP, sounds tired. Far from it in fact; Red Barked Tree is one of the most compact  and immediately accessible albums in the band's catalogue, touching in particular on that aforementioned holy trinity of records from 1977-79, but given just a little bit more studio polish. The up-front approach of Red Barked Tree comes through immediately on opener Please Take, wherein bassist Graham Lewis intones, with perhaps just a little bit too much deliberation, "f*ck off out of my face, you take up too much space", and on the crisp Two Minutes, a buzzing 120 seconds-worth of raw riffage and Colin Newman's scathing remarks on the end of western civilization and  "religious vomit". Moreover reprises the riff from A Question Of Degree (formerly a bonus track on an earlier edition of Chairs Missing) and beefs it up significantly as it scythes through Newman's warped vocals, and the nagging rhythm of Clay recalls the classic I Am The Fly.

These songs and much of the remaining material succeed because, and not despite of, their familiarity but when Red Barked Tree wanders down other avenues that things unfortunately go a bit awry. Adapt is a pleasant enough diversion of gauzy shoegaze guitars, but an otherwise concise album is marred slightly by its final two cuts, Down To This and the title track. Both songs touch upon the five-minute mark despite being bereft of ideas, content to trudge along aimlessly for what seems an eternity.

These abberations however, are not enough to derail a solid outing, delivered  for the most part with conviction, and a significant improvement on 2008's largely disappointing Object 47. If nothing else, Red Barked Tree show that Wire still have a firm grasp of past glories and that drawing from them doesn't have to mean going through the motions.

73/100

Listen to the new Wire album now!

Post-punk stalwarts Wire are back this month with a new album Red Barked Tree, out on the 11th on their own Pink Flag label. It's possibly their most accessible set of songs to date, an amalgamation of much of their previous styles, with nudges in new directions too. Expect to see a review here soon, but in the meantime you can stream the album in full on the Guardian's website:

Wire - Red Barked Tree

The band will be on tour during the early part of February, with an additional date in London to mark the album's release.

Jan 11th: London, Rough Trade (East)

Feb 1st: Brighton, Komedia
Feb 2nd: London, Scala
Feb 3rd: Nottingham, Rescue Rooms
Feb 4th: Manchester, Roadhouse
Feb 5th: Dublin, Academy 2
Feb 8th: Edinburgh, Cabaret Voltaire
Feb 9th: Glasgow, King Tuts
Feb 10th: Bristol, The Fleece

Forthcoming Releases - January 2011

A Happy New Year to you all. Now we've come through Christmas and the endless compilations and Greatest Hits, it's time once again to turn attention towards new releases. January actually sees some relatively high-profile releases, including new releases from post-punk legends Wire and Gang Of Four (in the case of the latter, their first release of new material in 16 years). The month builds up nicely, and takes us into a packed February.

10/01
British Sea Power: Valhalla Dancehall (Rough Trade)
Ducktails: Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics (Woodsist)
Tape Deck Mountain: Secret Surf EP (Lefse)
Wire: Red Barked Tree (Pink Flag)

17/01
The Decemberists: The King Is Dead (Capitol)
Smith Westerns: Dye It Blonde (Fat Possum)

24/01
Deerhoof: Deerhoof vs Evil (Polyvinyl)
Destroyer: Kaputt (Merge)
Gang of Four: Content (Yep Roc)
Iron & Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean (Warner Bros)
The Joy Formidable: The Big Roar (Canvasback/Atlantic)
Sic Alps: Napa Asylum (Drag City)
Sonic Youth: SYR9 - Simon Werner a Disparu soundtrack (SYR)