Leave it to Deerhoof to empathize with Frankenstein’s monster. The prolific quartet has spent much of its career finding beauty in ugliness: post-apocalyptic cave drawings, a child-snatching milkman, chirpy noise-pop blasts about crows and ducks and Satan and more Satan. Their records remain coarse, raucous, immune to the veneer of staid professionalism that tends to afflict bands in their fourth decade of existence.
Noble and Godlike in Ruin, either the noise-rock group’s 19th or 20th album (depending on whether you count the little-heard 1996 curio Dirt Pirate Creed), certainly is. It takes its unusual title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a source of inspiration. Drummer Greg Saunier describes the album as “our low-budget, DIY Frankenstein: A sensitive, spurned, intelligent, dehumanized creature made out of people.” The record cover, a scraggly collage of the bandmates’ faces, stitched together, reflects the idea: a Deerhoofstein, if you will.
After several years of one-off experiments—a rapid-fire covers albuma first-ever Japanese-language album, a solo record from Saunier—the group returns to what you might call straightforwardly Deerhoof territory on Noble and Godlike in Ruin. But put the emphasis on Deerhoof, not straightforward. This is one of the band’s most abrasive albums to date, with mangled, fractured grooves like “Sparrow Sparrow” and “Ha, Ha Ha Ha, Haaa” that simulate the experience of realizing your open tabs are playing multiple songs simultaneously. An anarchic free-jazz squawk weaves its way through “Who Do You Root For?,” while “Disobedience” is as queasy and discordant as the mutiny Satomi Matsuzaki seems to be singing about: “99 to 1/Captain has a gun,” she cheerily exclaims. Songs don’t end so much as collapse into cacophonous outros.
While Deerhoof’s last album, 2023’s Miracle-Level, captured the serrated immediacy of their live performances, Noble and Godlike in Ruin is cluttered and dense, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Everything feels stitched together, almost surgical—like, well, a Frankenstein monster. When the approach works, it’s exciting: “Kingtoe” has a perverse refrain (“You make machines/And I am one!”) and a woozy melody held together by a toy-like piano riff, with Matsuzaki’s interlocking vocals coming together in a round at the end. When it doesn’t, the band’s raw power is undermined by jumbled, overstuffed arrangements, as on the aforementioned “Disobedience.” There’s a majestic ballad lurking somewhere in “A Body of Mirrors,” but the maximalist arrangement gives it little room to breathe.
Because the group’s sensibility is filtered through Matsuzaki’s childlike wonder, Deerhoof haven’t always been thought of as a political band. Critics too often shrugged off their lyrics as nonsense. But longtime fans will recognize a radical leftist spirit that’s infiltrated their songwriting in recent years, with songs like 2014’s “Exit Only” and 2020’s “New Orphan Asylum for Spirited Deerchildren” taking surreal aim at the excess cruelties of modern American life. (As for walking the walk, they premiered this album’s lead single on Craigslista rare tech platform that “isn’t blatantly supporting fascism.”)
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