The song starts with lurching effects and percussion before segueing from riotous soca to lugubrious funk to what sounds like drunkard's take on Cuban son. The lyrics are in Catalan. The singer is Japanese. Yep—it's Deerhoof. "Qui Dorm, Només Somia," the curtain-raiser on the San Francisco art-punks' tenth studio album, is typical of the group's ADD stylings, shifting on a dime from quiet to loud, whipsawing between genres and time signatures, while Satomi Matsuzaki coos shiny melodies in an eerie pipsqueak voice. Deerhoof vs. Evil breaks no new ground; "The Merry Barracks" and "C'Moon" boast the band's signature mix of dissonance and pop tunefulness, with surreal lyrics that can be too self-consciously quirky. But in songs like "Hey I Can," there's some Sixties utopianism lurking in Deerhoof's bustling musical mix. "Love, love, love, love," Matsuzaki sings. "Fun, fun, fun, fun."

Listen to "The Merry Barracks":

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“Ambling Alp”

The "Ambling Alp" was the nickname of the six-and-a-half-foot-tall Primo Carnera. Though the song is named after the Italian-born 1930s heavyweight champion, Yeasayer are actually paying tribute to boxing legend Joe Louis with this first-person psychedelic dance-rock tune. “I was always interested in writing a song that had boxing mythology in it,” Yeasayer’s Chris Keating said. “It’s pretty fascinating: There were so many amazing characters, and it was so closely entwined with 20th century history.” Yeaseyer also invokes German champ Max Schmeling and hints at the historical significance placed on the historic bouts between the Nazi-era boxer and the African-American Louis.