Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
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CD Details
Artist: DeerhoofBrand: Baker & Taylor
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 2007-01-23
Model: 00759656047227
Music Label: Kill Rock Stars
Soundtracks:
- The Perfect Me
- +81
- Believe ESP
- The Galaxist
- Choco Fight
- Whither the Invisible Birds?
- Cast Off Crown
- Kidz Are So Small
- Matchbook Seeks Maniac
- Look Away
Music reviews of Friend Opportunity
Music Review: Not everyone will want to be Deerhoof's friend, but I do!
Rating: 5 Stars
Oft times, music bears a striking resemblance to food. Imagine all of the parallels - pop radio is like candy (you think it tastes good and is harmless, but it's quite damaging), rock and roll is like a cheeseburger and fries (it can be bland and cliché, but great versions of the dish still exist), southern rock is like fried anything (you know it's not good for you, but damn it tastes good), and country music is like Mom's home cooking (it might not be fine dining, but when it's good, it's really good). It's enough to make you wonder what other allusions you can make (without engaging in some really ugly stereotyping). Where does hip-hop/rap stand (and do I have to separate East Coast v. West Coast v. Dirty South)? Doesn't Brit-pop sound better than most British food tastes? And how in the world does one even begin to categorize indie rock (besides referring to it as the tofu of the music world - better for you, but not everyone can acquire a taste for it)?
Then along comes a group like Deerhoof. Here's a band whose possesses sonic tastes and textures that threatens to totally throw off one's musical palate. For more than a decade now, the voice of Satomi Matzusaki has confounded pop music aficionados with her heavily-accented voice in that, as exotic as it might be, it still seems to blend with the beats, riffs, and jams compiled by the 3 guys in the group (guitarist John Dieterich, drummer Greg Saunier, and guitarist Chris Cohen, who left the band in Summer/Fall 2006 to record with his band The Curtains). It's as if the band wants to intentionally mess with your musical mind by drawing you in with their talent, confusing you with Satomi's vocal technique, and then compelling you to keep listening as you wonder just where the album will progress next.
So, when Friend Opportunity released in January, I was curious to see where the band was headed now that they had been reduced to a 3-piece. Would they continue with the more straight-ahead rock of The Runners Four or would they bend more towards the quirky psychadelia of Reveille? Well, much to my pleasant surprise, it seems that Deerhoof has placed themselves upon a middle path that embraced both versions of the group, while not watering down their signature aesthetic. With songs like "The Perfect Me", "Believe E.S.P.", and "Cast Off Crown", the band is more than willing to craft a sound that tears down one's conception of what indie rock is supposed to be as it blissfully and wildly pulls in influences from jazz, prog rock, and soul (just listen to those horn arrangements and keyboard swells).
So, much to my chagrin, when I listened to the album through several times, I began to realize that this album left me wanting more that it provided, which can be good thing. You want people to want more of your music whenever an album is over, but when the core of this album (the first 9 songs) is not-quite 25 minutes long (the 10th song is a rambling, minimalist mess that clocks in at 11:45), I was left scratching my head and wondering, "And?!?! Is this all you're giving me? Are you sure there's not something more I'm missing? Am I too dense and bound up in traditional pop music motifs to get what's going on here?"
I was more than querulous as to why, if these 9 songs are so great, are there so few of them, and, since they're so short, why couldn't they have embraced their prog influences a bit more tightly and recorded at least one carefully constructed song that came close to 4 minutes long. This album is simply too excellent to truly be this brief - then again, maybe I am missing something. Maybe the reason that my favorite Deerhoof album is The Runners Four is that it's the most coherent and focused in its desire to both embrace and deconstruct what we think we know about good, robust, quality pop music. It is frustrating to thoroughly enjoy what one hears and to not understand exactly what just happened - and that might be exactly what attracts me to what this band does with its music.
Is Friend Opportunity worth a good listen-to? Absolutely, as it's full of superb musicianship and is destined to make any decent music listener curious as to what really makes this band tick. So, if you're looking for a food comparison, Deerhoof is to music as haute cuisine is to food - you're not exactly sure why the portions are so small, you're not used to such a eccentric presentation, and it's certainly not something the average person consumes on a regular basis. But you're OK with that, since you enjoy what you eat, even if not enough people understand why.
Description of Friend Opportunity
For some reason, feels like this one feels like it's trying to find a solution to the past several albums to me. like they were all asking questions, and this one is trying to find an answer to the question. Electric rainbow!If you've heard Deerhoof's noisier forays, the screaming of Satomi Matsuzaki mixed with their lo-fi-gone-mad sonic sense, then Friend Opportunity is going to sound like radio-ready pop. Rest easy, though: the album's mélange of melody and big riffs doesn't give up much ground. Greg Saunier's drums do jump out, sounding studio-painted in their crispness and deep kick-drum thunderclaps to open the album. And is that a touch of Tony Iommi for a few seconds on "The Galaxist"? Matsuzaki still finds her way to float spaceward, with orchestral washes and synth underscores along for the ride, on "Whither the Invisible Birds?" Then there's more drums, more guitar, all of it pitch-perfectly rendered. It's still fractured, but you won't even cut yourself on the edges while dancing techno to the stripped, jerky beat of "Kidz Are So Small." --Andrew Bartlett
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