Ruminant creatures

This PopMatters interview with Deerhoof's John Dieterich is worth a read:

You guys opened for Wilco not too long ago. What was that experience like?

That was a new thing for us. We played in venues much bigger and fancier than anything we ever played in before. For us, it was a challenge to try to communicate our music in that sort of environment. Have you ever seen that Led Zeppelin DVD that came out a couple of years ago? It's quite incredible -- here was a band coming of age playing in stadiums. It wasn't an accident that they sounded that good. Just through trial and error, they learned how to have their music come across in that kind of environment, which is kind of a rarity and difficult to pull off. They were able to respond to their environment and made music that worked like that. I think we sound better in places that aren't super-tiny or huge.

Do you think that's a sound issue, or do you think it's because you don't play epic, grand-sounding songs?

Well, I think there's a lot of detail in our songs, and that kind of detail, in a huge environment, gets lost. Through all the reverberation happening, one sound gets confused with the next. If we're playing in a big place, we try to play a little bit slower. It helps give a sense of the articulation. Whereas if you are playing it fast, it can end up sounding like mush.

[...]

Did your previous experience impact how Deerhoof's sound has evolved since you joined?

I think the band was already in the midst of some sort of shift before I joined. I was coming from a group where most of what we did was free improvisation. If we did play songs, it was very abstract. When the possibility of joining Deerhoof came up, it was extremely exciting, especially to work in the framework of Satomi's voice. I was also really attracted to the way melody was used in the band. I had been in a band with a singer before, but a lot of the singing wasn't very melodic -- let's put it that way.

Comments

[squashed Lemon]

1.

The pop matter blurbs is pretty weird.

"The album finds Deerhoof discarding the cute sonic tricks of their prior albums, fleshing out instead a darker and denser aesthetic. The album has earned the band generous praise from media outlets far and wide, including a gushing review from New York Times critic Ben Ratliff."

Deerhoof has material talking about apocalypse and some conceptual material before "Milkman" and 'Apple 'O'. Their 'Reveille' material is pretty dark.