Deerhoof have surprise-released a new covers album titled Love-Lore. It’s a 35-minute, 43-track LP recorded as a medley live in the studio. The album is now available digitally via Joyful Noise. Listen to it below.
Recorded in one afternoon at Manhattan’s Rivington Rehearsal Studios, the band had previously debuted the medley the previous night at the 2019 Time:Spans Festival. Spanning multiple decades, it includes covers of Ornette Coleman, Beach Boys, Gary Numan, the Police, Kraftwerk, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, the B-52s, the Velvet Underground, Dionne Warwick, and more.
“That concert, in August 2019, in a small hall on the west side of Manhattan, was a special event that I will remember for the rest of my time,” music historian and friend of the band, Benjamin Piekut, wrote in a statement accompanying the release. “I suspect the other 180 people there had a similar feeling. In the first minute or two, I might have caught a fleeting glance from Satomi that wondered, “What have we gotten ourselves into?,” but if such a doubt did exist, it faded quickly. The concert was not brief but it went by in a dazzling flash; I am still amazed that these musicians—all of them, but especially Ed—memorized one hour’s worth of music for a single performance (that’s a lot of notes). At the time, I experienced both of these elements (Satomi’s doubt and Ed’s recall) as contributions to a greater treatise on risk: any real hazard requires uncertainty, demands focus, and invites a response.”
He continued: “Hearing that program again, now as a recording, brings to mind nothing if not Sonic Youth’s 1999 record, Goodbye 20th Century, another album that I hold dear. While Sonic Youth worked from scores by Cage, Wolff, and other composers, Deerhoof takes a more vernacular approach, learning the music of their predecessors by ear, straight off the record, and then revising it in practice. If Sonic Youth cultivated a certain reverence for the ancestors, Deerhoof seems both more skeptical and less respectful—a measure, perhaps, of how the last twenty years have affected our relationships to the modernist projects of futures past.”
Deerhoof released their most recent studio album, Future Teenage Cave Artists, back in May.
