“I think it was just a non-stop panic attack on stage” is how Deerhoof drummer/founder Greg Saunier assesses the past two years of playing as a trio. After expanding to a quartet back in 2002 with Chris Cohen, and subsequently losing him, recording their most elaborately orchestrated album to date (last year’s Friend Opportunity) and then having to try and play it live, Saunier points out that they’ve been undergoing the equivalent of Olympic conditioning. But with the recent addition of long-time friend Ed Rodriguez on guitar, that panic attack should give way to an impressive sonic one.
On the line from his San Francisco home after band practice, Saunier explains: “You know how sometimes swimmers when they’re training put weights on their legs, or when you’ll see baseball guys warming up and they have four bats in their hands, so when it comes time to do it, everything seems so easy. That’s how it feels now,” he says. “It’s just like suddenly levitating, and gravity has disappeared. Time has slowed down and it feels very musical.”
Hearing a statement like that should give any listener reason for pause, coming from a band who’ve challenged audiences with their idiosyncratic mix of impossibly high-pitched vocal melodies, nerd-worthy guitar work and unruly, multidirectional drumming for the past 14 years. If their sonic wind resistance had reached an ambitious peak with Friend Opportunity’s leadoff track “The Perfect Me,” imagine what they’ll do now that such songs come easy.
For the band, the only downside seems to be that the transition back into “the runners four” has been entirely too easy. “We weren’t even planning to have Ed play at this show because he only joined two weeks ago,” says Saunier of Deerhoof’s March 5 CMW date at the Phoenix. “We got so excited about how we sound now, we’ve instantly reverted to whatever untrained version that we had before the last two years. All the muscles that we had built up have instantly atrophied, and now that Ed’s in the band we can’t even conceive of making a single move without him.”
The band has also begun working on a follow-up to Friend Opportunity. Speaking days earlier with guitarist John Dieterich, who also plays with Rodriguez in their long-standing instrumental Gorge Trio, it seems adding a new member is not the only modification that they’ve made to their process.
Dieterich explains, “The way we’re approaching this is a little more logical than the way we usually record, which is where we get together, show each other ideas and immediately — like the second time we play it — we record it.
“We finally got a practice space, we’re working everything out, we’re playing together and it just feels a lot more doable in a way.”
In the past when Deerhoof played live, songs could go in many directions at any given time, depending on what drum fill Saunier managed to jam inside a riff or how much space Dieterich and bassist/singer Satomi Matsuzaki decided to leave out. “As a group we would like to grow in the sense that if we play songs for years and years each song becomes its own musical language and you learn to improvise in it,” says Dieterich. “But ideally what would be nice is if we could learn that language before we record it or perform it. So we’re fluent in it before we start showing it to people.”
Lest there be any concern that Deerhoof will become too polished, Saunier illustrates one of the central paradoxes of their band dynamic: “It’s very funny because all of us, everyone who’s ever been in the band, one thing we shared in common is this deep-seated desire to make stark, incredibly simple skeletal stripped-down music,” he says. “And yet, 90 per cent of the time I’m patting myself on the back for how skeletal we are, then the other 10 per cent of the time I might go back and hear something that we’ve played, and it could not be more opposite. It’s like so full and everybody is playing all the time.”
Maybe expecting the unexpected isn’t just a general rule for the audience. “We play all kinds of mental games, to try and elicit the unexpected from our imagination,” says Saunier. “I feel like if we didn’t do that, who knows what we’d actually end up sounding like; what the real Deerhoof sounds like. It’d be horrible.”