Completed from scratch in seven days, The Magic features 15 songs veering from spindly, fidgety No Wave excursions to tuneful yet harsh pop-New Wave nuggets and headache-inducing bangers. In short, Deerhoof’s 13th album proper encapsulates everything they have done to date from 1997’s debut album The Man, The King, The Girl.
The prescriptive approach is nothing new. Its predecessor La Isla Bonita was similarly speedily tracked live in a basement, and the album before that, 2013’s Breakup Song, was collated from digital files each band member had made separately. Seemingly, Deerhoof are congenitally unable to make an album in a traditional manner.
This of course has is upsides and downsides. On The Magic, “Patrasche Come Back” is a lo-fi noodle that no one would miss and the ghostly, glitchey, wobbly “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” could, if fleshed out, have been an affecting ballad. The wonderful, clangerous “Acceptance Speech” has though arrived fully formed and feels like a future live highlight. As ever, Deerhoof frustrate. Perhaps, at some point, they might ditch the strategies, take time to write their songs, then develop them, weed out the clunkers, record without self-imposed limits and make the classic album they obviously have within them.
