“Men’s hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against evil only.” – Thomas Carlyle

“Me, to the rescue.” – Deerhoof

After 10 albums as challenging and uncompromising as we have received from the heroes of high output, Deerhoof, where do we end up? Deerhoof have been writing their own riddle for some time now…simultaneously cute and abrasive, these unclassifiable musical labyrinths are creatively trailblazing and genre melding, sonically innovative and compositionally lawless, but always immediately and undeniably their own. The only ones who could’ve ever mastered this puzzle are it’s authors, and they now have. Deerhoof dug a deep creative hole and have made it a home, inspiring some of the best bands of our time to try harder and go further.

Deerhoof vs. Evil is the culmination of musical weapons that the band have been building, across their catalog. This home-recorded work is cleaner sounding than any previous offerings, but that only acts as a springboard for using the lo-fi element in a more focused way, and when we jump across the divide, from the clean to the totally filthy, over driven sounds of previous albums, it is really compelling. And as a self-recorded album, DvsE is a major accomplishment just in that fact. It sounds like a band that not only made 10 great previous albums, but a band that was taking very good notes the whole time.

We’ve never had any choice but to follow Deerhoof (as there were no real clues as to where they were coming from or going), and now that they’ve lead us to quite a party at the apex of their stylish, unapologetically eccentric mountain. With moments of true loveliness, new extremes in sound experimentation, and their most vividly dynamic landscape of genre-play of all, it’s hard to wonder just yet where they’ll go next. It’s just so awesome to finally have them here.

recommended track: Ok, start with “The Merry Barracks” and the weirdly Latino “No One Asked to Dance”