Deerhoof mixes, matches, and entertains

"D-U-M-B. Everyone's accusing me," sang Deerhoof's John Dieterich at the TLA on Friday night. Even though the words came from the Ramones' "Pinhead," the decision to open the set with them might have been taken as a statement of purpose. Might have, that is, had Dieterich not at the moment he sang them been strumming the song's chords on a 12-string guitar, not an instrument generally associated with dumbing it down.

The last thing you'd mistake Deerhoof for is underachievement. For one thing, the band has been at it for 17 years, a long time for anyone, but especially for a group that plays its kind of clattering, fractured noise-rock. Deerhoof's songs shift gears so frequently that it's hard to keep track, to know whether a shift from gentle guitar plucking to a free-form noise assault signals the end of one song and the beginning of the next or simply a transition between parts of a whole.

More impressively, the group manages to do all that while still playing music that can be danced to and sung along with, as the TLA crowd was happy to demonstrate. Of course, it helped to know the songs in advance, lest you speed too fast into a hairpin curve and end up on your back. "Qui Dorm, Només Somia," sung in Catalan by bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, began with a flurry of rapid, sunny guitar riffs, morphed abruptly into a thudding two-step, then into a stuttering, almost mechanical, march.

Omnivorous mixing and matching on the band's new album, Deerhoof Vs. Evil, recalls the anything-goes bacchanalia of Brazilian tropicalia. But where a band such as Os Mutantes used psychedelic pop to channel the liberating energy of the struggle against political repression, Deerhoof's agenda is more idiosyncratic and personal. In "Super Duper Rescue Heads!," Matsuzaki repeated the phrase "Me to the rescue" over and over in her naive chirp, like a superhero cooking up her own personal theme song. No one needed saving that night, but if he or she had, Deerhoof was on the case.