Reveille
Four albums into Deerhoof's wonderful and frightening career, it's not easy to ''expect'' anything from them; that's not really what they're ''about''. But if you figured that their third outing, Reveille, would consist of more of the same synapse-frying screeches and rock-driven salvos of noise they've built their name on, you could be forgiven for being wrong. See, there's this line somewhere between ''accessibility'' and The Man, The King, and The Girl, and if Deerhoof haven't quite stepped across it with this album, they're moving in the right direction.Reveille still offers plenty of clattering fury-- just not as much as you may be used to. This time around, the gleeful chaos of their last two Christmas cards from the asylum has been tempered into something more endearingly bizarre. The record careens through sixteen tracks (most of which don't even break two minutes) whose frantic disparity is matched only by their seeming pop innocence. No track is like the one preceding-- or anything else on the album, for that matter-- and even though most of tracks make liberal use of the standard rock armaments (guitars, bass, and lots of drums), few can be so readily described.Deerhoof confounds the casual toss-off of classifiers with a boatload of additional instrumentation: bells, toy xylophones, flutes, strings, and organs, all employed in the most conspicuous way possible. But this veil of eccentricity is like the invisible paint on the stealth bomber, cloaking insidiously sweet melodies (primarily carried by much of the ''accessory'' instrumentation) past all defenses, allowing Deerhoof to deliver its payload of weird-pop hooks directly to your subconscious. Between Satomi Matsuzaki's candy-coated vocals (the earlier limitations of which she seems to have outgrown), and simple arrangements that permit the myriad elements of this album to shine, there's a remarkable wealth of gorgeous melody.In fact, the album falters just twice, and barely at that. ''No One Fed Me So I Stayed'' isn't so much music as it is the muffled sounds of a strange, tortured creature bound and gagged in a cedar chest. Nevertheless, in the album's context, it's surprisingly funny (at least, I laughed, if only out of disbelief-- hilarious or harrowing; take your pick), it just disturbs the pace of the album by being too weird, even among Reveille's other brain-damaging moments. Slightly more serious is the awkward lull caused by the eight-minute ''The Last Trumpeter Swan''. It's a pleasantly straightforward, hypnotic piece of guitar work, primarily, though the least musically engaging piece Deerhoof offer here. Of course, it wouldn't even be an issue if weren't also the album's temporal core, and the only real stall to be found amongst the general panic.It's hard to care much about Reveille's few missteps, though, when confronted with the staggeringly beautiful composition of the remainder of the album. Every cut is a true experience, uniquely inventive and sublime. From the glitch-addled guitar work on ''Holy Night Fever'', to the spacy chanting of ''Our Angel's Ululu'', to ''Top Tim Rubies'' (which was surely rescued from Clinic's dustbin), you're staring down the barrel of total awesomeness. Okay, so that oversells it a little, but not by much. Let's just say this: Reveille's scope needs to be heard to be appreciated. --PitchforkDeerhoof are scary. What they have done on their latest release, Reveille, is reimagine the ''Dies Irae'' as populated by little furry things. These are the first words spoken on the album by Satomi Matsuzaki: ''The trumpet scatters its awful sound over the graves of all lands / Summoning all before the throne / Death and mankind shall be stunned / When nature arises to give account before the judge''. One way of reading ''nature'' in this verse is in an abstract sense. But in the pseudo-cosmology created by Deerhoof on this album, it is specifically the animals that will be judging humans.With an album titled ''Reveille'', and songs named ''Sound the Alarm'' and ''Hark the Umpire'', the band seems like it wants to wake us up (puny humans that we are) and realize that another world populates ours. To borrow other titles, ''The Eyebright Bugler'' could be alerting us to this fact, as is ''The Last Trumpeter Swan''. But why would these creatures care about us? The answer s probably given in the title of the song quoted above: ''The Magnificent Bird Will Rise''. We ll all have to pay at the final judgment, but a phoenix will arise from our ashes...Although Reveille is not technically a concept album (there's no futuristic society here bowing under the weight of a totalitarian regime, nor is there any mythology to extrapolate from its lyrics, which are either incomprehensible or nonexistent), its first two songs provide a peek into the ways that Deerhoof creates musical order from chaos...This is maddening album. But it's absolutely a rewarding one. --Popmatters