Deerhoof, ‘The Magic’

Making it through a Deerhoof album is always an endurance test, and the long-running San Francisco indie-rock band’s 14th and latest, “The Magic,” is no exception.

It opens with a cacophony of out-of-tune guitar riffs, machine-gun snares and singer Satomi Matsuzaki’s operatic wailing on “The Devil and His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue.”

[...] the erratic pace doesn’t let up for the next 40 minutes as 15 tracks collapse into each other in a flurry of joyful thrashing and willful eclecticism.

From the fuzzy garage rock of “That Ain’t No Life for Me” to droning dream-pop of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” it’s an album that offers new twists with every listen and rewards patience with enough fleeting moments of pop transcendence to keep the band barreling ahead for years to come.