Tuesday 12/10/05 Deerhoof, The Drones, Alexander Tucker @ The Garage, London

Walking into a venue halfway through an Alexander Tucker set is something best avoided. The confusion this can cause can be somewhat overwhelming, not least of all because of the name. There are three people on stage, surely they can’t all be Alexander Tucker? So is he the one making the "skroooouuunk" noise, the one making the "krrrriiieeerrk" noise or the tubby beardy bloke on the floor making the "woooooaargghh" noise? Are they all Alexander Tucker?? Is that the appeal here? A band made up entirely of people named Alexander Tucker?

 

Dear lord, it’s confusing, but not half as confusing as why The Drones are playing tonight. A band who dramatically fail to live up to the promise of their name with nary a drone, be it musical or mechanical, in sight…unless, of course, by ‘drone’ you mean it in the way that my father ‘drones’ on about the price of stamps for example. But not only do they fail to drone, they fail to impress - their tired, limp, clichéd rock stuttering its way across the venue, managing to excite only those not quite intelligent enough to realise how boring it really is.

 

And so it comes to Deerhoof to save the evening; a band who, at a young age, were handed pop music by a well meaning friend. This friend didn’t realise that he was giving this little gift to a group of epileptic, arse-backwards, jerky, a-rhythmic dorks with a severe pop allergy who, for all intents and purposes, took said music and played it inside out…and back to front for that matter. Not just that, but three members of said band may in fact be the same person, replicated three times over in different sizes, with different instruments. What else could explain tonight’s jerky musical palpitations being so concisely communicated between the musicians? But attempting to explain away the free-form musical spaz-fest that happens onstage tonight is totally futile, they twitch their jazzy way through so many different twisted landscapes, from the dissonant horror-prog of their ‘Milkman’-era songs to the more recent free-association skronk from ‘The Runners Four,’ that you're left entirely bewildered with barely anything to grab on to and let yourself be taken away with.

 

But that’s what’s really incredible about Deerhoof, it’s not the existence or absence of melody or rhythm, but the implication of it. So you're left to your own devices, to imagine you’re hearing the same song the four band members are as the convulsive noise jerks through your ears and leaves you a confused wreck of a listener. Chances are, we’re not hearing the same song as them, and it’s probably going right over our heads, but oh well, at least we look cool in our new Deerhoof t-shirts right?