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.
