Reveille

Deerhoof | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 4, 2002)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Kill Rock Stars
• ASIN: B000066JG5
• In-Print Editions: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #215,029 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Review

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. --Pitchfork

Deerhoof 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

Product Description

The result of a very long labor, Reveille feels to me like the sound of kids cleaning up after a messy birthday party. High on sugar but exhausted from pin the tail on the donkey.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

121 of 149 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Deerhoof across the age divide, November 26, 2003

By 

happydogpotatohead "happydogpotatohead" (New Orleans, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Reveille (Audio CD)

25 Year-Old: This band is amazing! Have you heard these guys?

43 Year-Old: Yeah, I have. This is a good band for sure.

25-Year-Old: You're not as enthusiastic as you should be! These guys are doing something DIFFERENT!

43-year-old: Well, not really. The jump-cut editing and the noise bursts combined with the freaky jamming remind me a lot of Faust, especially on Faust's first album.

25-year-old: Are you saying they're imitating Faust? And who's Faust? You mean DJ Faust?

43-year-old: NO. Faust was a band of insane German hippies who made some really interesting records in the 1970's that influenced a lot of people. Go look up "So Far" by Faust on Amazon. And Deerhoof is not imitating Faust, that's not what I'm saying.

25-year-old: So what ARE you saying, you old coot?

43-year-old: Watch it, kid, you'll be my age someday. What I am saying is that Deerhoof has the same sense of uninhibited experimentalism that Faust had. They sound like they just don't give a flip what anybody thinks and they want to play whatever they want, which is really cool in this corporate rock era.

25-year-old: So you *do* get it.

43-year-old: Of course I do. Listen, punk, I knew about "noise rock" before you were even dirtying your diapers properly. Back in my day we used to call it "art rock" and that's what this is. It's good art rock, with a lot of energy and freakishness. Plus, I like the singer and her weird "The animals will testify against us on Judgment Day" pronouncement on the first song.

25-year-old: That's the second song.

43-year-old: Whatever. I don't consider 30 seconds of bells and burping a song.

25-year-old: You don't think rap is music either.

43-year-old: Don't get me started. Let's just be glad that Deerhoof is a great band that we can both agree on, OK?

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shining Star of 2002, March 26, 2003

By 

Michael Alexander (New Haven, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reveille (Audio CD)

After two albums of clever noise, Deerhoof has the audacity to drop one of the catchiest albums of the last 5 years. Take formidable blasts of raw but soaring, often dissonant guitar, plenty of wild studio trickery, some seriously sugary melodies, and an incessantly cute Japanese chick on vocals, and you only have the ingredients, because the warped noise-pop coming out of your speakers will stick in your head for WEEKS. Very few of the songs sound anything like each other, and they're played so earnestly and unbelaboredly that it sounds as if the band could churn them out at this quality for eternity (and, well, the similar-but-even-more-accessible follow-up Apple O proves that they're far from done). Almost nobody sounds like Deerhoof, and if you like noise- or avant-pop, the music that makes you go giddy with simple enjoyment before you realize just how _interesting_ it is, click the buy button before you have the chance to change your mind. Trust me: this is a tremendous album that never feels like one. It's so simply _GOOD_ you'll forget it's also Great.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Yoko Ono's Thinking Fellers sing Sonic Youth, June 22, 2002

By 

slappy "unitedway" (somewhere else) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reveille (Audio CD)

Despite my moderately retarded intro title above, you can't really describe Deerhoof by lame-o comparisons. It's scuzzed-out guitar rock experimentations that veer toward the precipice, only to pull back into awesome melodies and even quirky pop.

This record is "sing-along-noise"...and that's a real compliment in my universe.