Review: Deerhoof-Friend Opportunity

By: Alibastard | in: Music |

What can be said about this Bay Area mystery? Adjectives flee, burying themselves in the stupid ruins of ego music, worshipfully incapable of explaining. O fricken Muse.

deerhoof

When I tried explaining to a friend, I said, “What rock would sound like if it was jazz.”
“Jazz” before it was so bored with itself - nailed down to tired rituals of over-notation and left for dead in the BMG graveyard, séanced by the pining hot-dogger instrumentalists, more equations up their sleeves than feelings, and the middle-aged smooth weirdos looking for something null to get laid to.
There’s nothing about Deerhoof that’s technically improvisational (though its so fresh sometimes it might feel that way). And there’s little attention to formal, Berkeley-style musicianship. But their persistent reinvention of their sound, even within individual songs, is reminiscent of the kind of jittery musical unrest that recalls Miles Davis and John Coletrane, and the less smoothly orchestrated output of early King Crimson.
So Deerhoof has most definitely always been innovative, energetic and un-inflated. But with their 2007 release of “Friend Opportunity”, the recent-trio has melded their challenging, tangential frequencies with a streamlined thrust, focusing their style into a 10 song gem that renders the term “genre-defying” almost completely useless to explain. Defying “genre-defying“ actually. And yet the songs are friendly, take permanent residence in the ear, hanging out even more easily than in previous efforts, still shaking their legs manically on the couch, just a little lighter, maybe a little more aware that they are now leading independent music almost single handedly. The confidence is happy.
True, their sound retains the amateurish tone that makes you think they just came up with this playful ingenuity the second before they pressed RECORD. Yet skillfully John, Greg and Satomi blend frenzy with leitmotif, the explosive with the anticlimactic, like a chorus of voices whose language you never heard before, but whose babble is starkly intuited, and makes your gut tingle with happy orgasm.
You also get a sense they don’t require more conventional acts as a springboard for their personal music revolution. You imagine these people woke up as children in a cave, surrounded by instruments and eventually made their albums totally unaware of all the music less inspired groups defy, ironically emulate or find their sound just polarizing from, or compounding just so they can get someone to write them up as “genre-defying”.
But where 1997’s “The Man, The King, The Girl” was Deerhoof’s harrowing wail, fresh from the birth canal, “Friend Opportunity” is trimmed down, more assembled, and still miraculously not overproduced. It jitters, but it feels powerful, enthroned, not just rebellious, terse. You shake your ass, you think about E.S.P., you get lost in a church organ, you get freaked out. All that used to happen, though this is maybe the first time I found myself shaking my ass. The song structures seem more integrated, overlapping a few times within themselves, but without ever making you think “A-B-A-B-GODDAMN-I’M-BORED.” Still, there is follow-through with the kind of mesmerizingly cool melodies that used to come at the end of chaos (“Midnight Bicycle Mystery” of The Runners Four par example) or were quickly abandoned for further frenzied rock outs.
Satomi’s vocals still conjure Miho Hatori’s inspired child-vision, but seem less of an afterthought than previous albums. Songs like “Kidz Are So Small” are near equivalents of Prince’s sporadically placed minimalist pop songs (“All The Critics Love U In New York” from 1999, “I Wonder U” from Parade) but with a vocal melody not entirely unlike M.I.A.’s nursery rhyme dance music, or Cibo Mato’s songs about food. And “The Perfect Me” opens the floodgates, like an electro-shock superhero anthem with a chorus invented by angels. What follows is non-traditional, sometimes dance-worthy, more polished throughout, but ending with a meditative, guitar-dominated ten minute epic, meandering with similar thoughtfulness that highlighted less distilled prior albums.
This is, perhaps, just in case you thought Deerhoof radically changed themselves with all these more refined forays into childlike strangeness.
They didn’t change themselves. They just became a little more friendly.

Deerhoof: +88

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Posted on February 11, 2007

Comments

4 Responses to “Review: Deerhoof-Friend Opportunity”

SR on February 19th, 2007 8:38 pm

I got the Deerhoof album based on this write-up. It’s interesting.

Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity at Candied Pop on May 3rd, 2007 6:24 am

[...] So while the album has some real bright spots and is definitely worth a listen it ultimately failed to captivate me. Take a sample of the album and judge for yourself as my opinion is in the minority (almost). [...]

skinnywhiteboy on May 7th, 2007 2:25 pm

candied - i reckon it’s their most complete album to date, and is my new favourite record. the variety and lack of focus is a device akin to keeping a catchy song super-short. you want to rewind immediately and hear it again. well, i do anyway. cheers.