Album Review: Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity

Rating: 5 out of 10

I admit to dreading this album. The last time I saw Deerhoof live (opening for Radiohead last summer at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley), bassist/guitarist Chris Cohen had just quit the band, and they seemed completely unable to fill that gaping hole in their sound. They've been on the road for practically the entire last year, and I expected the resulting album to sound rushed and perhaps even reactionary. And of course this band is incapable of recording the same album twice, a fact which has worked equally to their advantage and disadvantage. In fact, by my preferences they've alternated fantastic (Apple O', The Runners Four) and spotty (Reveille, Milk Man) releases. Following on that trend, I expected Friend Opportunity to be in the latter category.

Unfortunately, they've met my expectations on both regards. Friend Opportunity sounds not much at all like any previous Deerhoof albums. For the first time ever, electronics play a major role in the overall sound, whether it's the organs that drive fantastic opener "The Perfect Me", or the bleeps and bloops (for once we're not talking about Satomi's vocals!) that percolate in the background of nearly every song on the album. More distressingly, though, there's almost no sign of the chaotic, noisy Deerhoof of old. Granted, they've been moving steadily popward for the last couple albums. But whereas The Runners Four managed the balancing act between "sleek" and "unpredictable", too much of Friend Opportunity is just.... BORING. And that's a word I never wanted to use in reference to an album by this band.

It starts off with a bang, though. The first three songs are among the best they've ever written. "The Perfect Me" is classic Deerhoof - propulsive power chords (OK, on an organ this time around, but the effect is still recognizable) and Satomi's sing-song vocals on the verses, a couple leftward veers into rifftastic bridges, and a frenetic cowbell in the background throughout. "+81" introduces some jubilant trumpets into the mix and again twists and turns unpredictably like a mountain road. Finally, "Believe E.S.P." brings the funk, Deerhoof-style: a groovy bass/guitar riff battles it out with more cowbell, and Satomi's "pooky pooky beep beep" vocals. So far, so excellent.

But then it's all downhill. The energy level drops several notches, the mood becomes more contemplative than joyous, and the twists and turns start feeling more forced. "The Galaxist" is pretty, but unfocused. "Choco Fight" starts out promisingly with a lurching organ figure and some of Greg's counterpoint drumming, but after the first verse it turns into scales being played on a keyboard - too twee even for these folks to pull off. "Cast Off Crown" pulls the same trick, starting out strong with one of those immediately-memorable Deerhoof power riffs, but ultimately descending into a messy collage of strums and electronic noises. The nearly-twelve-minute closer "Look Away" is interesting as an experiment, but not particularly compelling as a repeat listen. And "Whither the Invisble Birds?" would not sound out of place in an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical - which, if you're at all familiar with this band, you'll recognize isn't a compliment.

I hate to be rough on Deerhoof... last year sucked for them. But ultimately this album feels rushed and unfocused. Of course, if they stay true to pattern, the next one will be another knockout. And certainly the first three songs on Friend Opportunity give plenty of reason to keep expectations high.

My favorite 10 albums of 2006

I went into writing this list feeling that 2006 had been a pretty disappointing year in music for me. But after hours of listening to these ten albums over and over, and trying to come up with creative and descriptive and accurate descriptions of them, I realized that a few of them had grown with familiarity. But here it is March of '07, I'm finally finished with this blog entry, and I'm ready to let 2006 go with a happier memory of it then when I started this piece.

My criteria for picking these albums, in roughly decreasing order of importance:

- consistency. How many of the songs do I like? How does the sequencing make the album flow as a whole rather than seeming like a collection of unrelated songs?
- innovation. How "fresh" is the sound? Are the influences only hinted at or painfully easy to spot?
- repeatability. Does the album invite repeated listen? Do i continue hearing new things in it every time I listen anew?
- emotional impact. The hardest to quantify or predict. Basically, to what extent does the album vibe for me? Is it specific to a certain mood or situation, or can I find myself enjoying it no matter what mood I'm in? (And a really great encapsulation of a certain mood holds equal weight in my book as a more "universal" album).

And here's the list...

10. Beirut - Gulag Orkestar

I'm a bit surprised to see this album sitting at the bottom of my list, but Gulag Orkestar beats out its competitors by virtue of its originality. Not "original" in the sense of innovative, mind you - but "original" in what it's recycling. How many other recent, putatively "rock" albums are built on a foundation of ukelele, accordian, brass, strings, and marching band drums? A lot of people wanted to throw around Neutral Milk Hotel comparisons, but that just goes to show how little reference we actually had for this little gem. (I kept toying with a comparison to the instrumental half of Telephone-Free Landslide Victory, but that's equally fatuous). Instead, let me suggest a more recent parallel: M.I.A. Maya and Zack both shamelessly plunder the musical traditions of "other" parts of the world, mixing and matching elements and coming up with catchy, sometimes surprising hybrids. And like Arular, Gulag Orkestar is open to as much meta-narrative (and -criticism) as one chooses to throw at it. Pretentious as hell? Yep. Culturally imperialistic? Probably. Does this necessarily have to hinder one's enjoyment of the album? Not at all, especially when Zack's rich tenor is one of the most interesting voices I've heard in a while - not just for how it sounds, but what he does with it. And just for the record, the Knife didn't own the entire 2006 market on multitracking vocals: the harmonies on "Mount Wroclai" transform what starts out as cheesy carnival music into an irresistible sing-along; "The Bunker" just keeps adding vocal counterpoints until it bursts at the seams into a trumpet-driven stomp. Where he goes from here is anyone's guess, but Gulag Orkestar is a worthwhile and memorable debut.

9. Herbert - Scale

And here Stereolab thought they'd recorded space age bachelor pad music. The operative word here is smooooooooooth... so smooth you could play it in elevators and never even notice how many really weird details there are just below the surface of all those tasteful strings and horns and silky vocals. But the details are there, as are the pictures of the hundreds of objects that he painstakingly recorded and sequenced into the mix. The end result is like your grandparents' jazz (or swing, or big band, or...) albums force fed through a Nintendo. Repeated listens are guaranteed to reveal new textures, new sounds, new pleasures - yet the album rarely feels overbusy or even that it was labored over. The overall lounginess of it initially turned me off (it's the only album on this list I could comfortably play for my grandmother), but all those electronic details are what finally sold me. Like the rhythm track on the choruses of "Down, which sounds like a bubble machine in high gear, or how the stomping bass line on the verses of "Movie Star" totally take me back to the "tribal" levels of Kid Icarus. Nor is it all gloss and whimsy - lyrically, the first verse of "The Movers and the Shakers" is a trenchant critique of the war in Iraq. Of course, the guests at your dinner party won't hear that, they'll just be nodding along to the song's revision of 50s swing, which just makes it all the more subversive.

8. Espers - II

Espers' 2004 debut was that rare album that grabbed my attention immediately and refused to give it back. Meg Baird's gorgeous, wispy vocals were the first thing I noticed, but what really sold me on the band was the constant tension in the music between melody and dissonance. It's a good sign when my roommate (who's developed an amazing ability to ignore whatever noise is emerging from my room) felt the need to poke his head in and inform me that "Hearts and Daggers" was "one of the most disturbing things [he'd] ever heard."

Well, nothing on II has evoked a repeat of that response as yet, and it also took me a bit longer to fall for this album's strengths. II is denser, darker, and more aloof than the debut. Espers are now a 6-piece, and the sound is correspondingly thicker. I'm left to speculate why the overall mood took a turn toward the heavy; the vocal melodies are still gorgeous but here they sound haunted. The guitar gets run through way more effects and distortion than last time, which makes it the instrument most likely to define the different "feels" of the songs. And so the last third of "Widow's Weed" is a frightening shitstorm of feedback, while the instrumental interlude of "Mansfield and Cyclops" is made downright eerie by a solo that slowly turns into a keening figure Thurston Moore would have been proud to own. The percussion is similarly diverse and creative, so that the beat of a song often becomes another part of its texture. I hope I'm not making the album sound like a slog - catch it in the right mood (I suggest rain on the windows and candlelight for a start) and it will captivate you.

7. The Knife - Silent Shout

The album on this list that you're most likely to have heard (or at least heard of)... would it surprise you to know that I really didn't like it much at first? Sure, "We Share Our Mother's Health" was my 2nd favorite song of 2006; I fell in love with it within the first twenty seconds the first time I heard it. But as a whole, I found Silent Shout too derivative, too dependent on the gimmick of multi-tracking the hell out of Kerin's vocals. Take those out of the mix, and seriously tell me that the title track or (especially!) "Forest Families" are musically anything more than reheated trance. The beats are neither innovative nor even all that varied. And the last third of the album, with the exception of the sprightly "One Hit", is a drag.

But then I saw them live, and I had to revise my opinion. Perhaps I was just guilty of a bit of hype backlash (I'm still puzzling over Pitchfork naming this Album of the Year). Perhaps I was just judging it by the wrong standards. The fact is, Silent Shout is a pretty great dance album. Considered within that context, the risks that the Knife took in crafting it become more evident. There's no escaping the effect of those vocals - I've yet to experience these songs in an altered state, but I can only imagine they're goose-bump-inducing. I haven't paid that much attention to the lyrics, but will happily concede they evade every single dance trope. "We Share Our Mother's Health" and "Like a Pen" are the immediate hits, but "The Captain" and "Neverland" are the slow burners I find myself repeatedly drawn to simply for the experience of listening to them. So, I concede defeat on this one... and will always be glad I have the images from the live show to accompany it.

6. Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things

Transparent Things is the epitome of cool. Just consider the different definitions of the word.

Cool as in "chilly"
The music is so slick and polished that it resists penetration. The surfaces are fractal - there are more details the closer you listen, but the pleasure equation is identical regardless of the scale at which you regard it.

Cool as in "aloof"
The lyrics aren't just inscrutable, they seem to be calculatedly puzzling. And yet they're intoned with such straightfaced seriousness that you'll find yourself constantly wondering what you're missing. Why does he need a new pair of shoes to "kick it with her"? Is your rocker "bleeding" because they're British, or because you're "losing your bodily fluids"? Are the band just taking the piss when they declare "We were / just preten- / -ding to be / Japanese," or are they offering a wry comment on their own self-mythologizing? Are the two incompatible? You figure it out.

Cool as in "composed"
Go ahead, lob your list of referents at Transparent Things. State the obvious: that "Cassettesingle" is Can with more modern equipment; that "Conductor" is the best Stereolab instrumental drone you've heard in years; that "In One Ear & Out the Other" is reheated funk. Your criticisms mean nothing to this album; it simply continues doing its thing, and doing it so well that you'll find it impossible to stop listening.

Cool as in "socially adept"
Try this at home: put on Transparent Things as background music to every single one of your daily activities. Clean the house to it. Cook dinner to it. Play it for your dinner party guests, and absolutely play it for your sexual partners. Pay attention to it, or don't. Either way, you'll discover that it's good company. It's happy to be sonic wallpaper - unobtrusive, simply nice to look at. But it's also happy to receive your scrutiny, which it will reward with an endless progression of added details. It is simultaneously utterly familiar and utterly strange. It's a thing of beauty. You need this in your life.

5. Giddy Motors - Do Easy

Right here is where this list takes a turn for the irredeemably, beautifully ugly. The album name has to be a joke - there's nothing simple about these twisted, snarling songs - but the band couldn't be better named. "Motors" in the sense that every song starts with the same template: insistent riffage; queasy monstrous bass lines; spare, inventive drumming that uses the negative space just as powerfully as the positive; and Gaverick de Vis' tortured howls, one of the most distinctive vocalists in recent memory. "Giddy" because these songs do not sit still. They're riff-tastic, but hardly monoliths (which is why the Soundgarden comparison I keep flirting with is ultimately inaccurate). The band set up internal structures only long enough to catch you off guard when they shift into jazzy breakdowns ("Sick," "Kapow"), long stretches of noisy chaos ("Panzrama"), or stop-start call-and-response ("Early Morning Pipe"). I really can't exaggerate how talented they are both as individuals and as an ass-stomping whole.

So why isn't the album #1 on my list? Well, it's only eight songs, the last two of which are uninspired instrumentals (particularly after all the dynamics and tension of what precedes them). Of the six that remain, "Nego" is a bit of a dud, the only song that stays pretty much the same from beginning to end. So that leaves five songs, which - no matter how queasily brilliant - add up to an EP, not a whole album. It's also a bad sign when a band takes three years to record eight songs, going through a couple bassists in the process (and Justin Stone has already left the band after Do Easy's release). So it doesn't get my "favorite album" nod, but it sure as hell gets my enthusiastic endorsement, and let's hope they can stabilize things a bit for the next one. (Then again, perhaps the lack of stability is exactly why this is so lovably nasty!)

4. Various - The World is Gone

Imagine that the boy in da corner is joined by a girl with an acoustic guitar. The corner in question is in a jail cell which is slowly flooding (how else to explain the overwhelming sense of dread?) The door is open, but they're too distracted by all the sonic architecture of the place to leave. In the background bellows whoosh, ancient machinery chugs, the wind howls through broken windows. Shadowy arachnid shapes creep around the walls, chittering and scraping and buzzing. The girl attempts to cheer them up by singing ballads, but even these are invaded by the setting. "Rest up while you can," she implores, but the conclusion is unavoidable: "You're a dead man."

The jail analogy is particularly apt because - much like a wall made of bars - the songs on this album contain more empty space than filled. It's an astounding feat of production that these songs can be explosively packed with sound, and still be built on so much silence. Like looking through jail cells, refuge is always visible, never attainable. But frankly - much like the boy and the girl - you'll be too captivated by the experience to even contemplate escape.

3. Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit

On which Belle & Sebastian fully realize their drift toward pure pop, reinventing themselves in the process as pillagers du jour. Every song on The Life Pursuit wears a different, immediately identifiable style, and yet the only time they sound derivative is when Belle & Sebastian rip off themselves (the R.E.M.ish jangle of "Another Sunny Day" could have comfortably fit on any B&S album up to this point). Otherwise, this album is like a mini-tour through the last 40 years of pop music history. With the exception of "To Be Myself Completely" - which totally reminds me of Diana Ross and the Supremes (only with a male vocalist) - I won't pretend to identify any of the styles being appropriated, but this album reminds me of being a kid, listening to the "oldies" station with my parents. The overall mood is buoyant but still muscular - just listen to the rumbling bass of "Sukie in the Graveyard" or the insistent last chorus of "Act of the Apostle II." And the best part is that they still manage to sound like Belle & Sebastian. The lyrics are still sly and clever, only now they're delivered in multi-part harmonies. "White Collar Boy" features a hilarious call-and-response concerning the dubious merits of a certain young woman; "Sukie in the Graveyard" celebrates its titular heroine for hanging out at the art school but not enrolling; and, "We are the Sleepyheads" manages to make outsiderhood sound fun. But then, "fun" is probably the operative word for the entire album.

2. Matmos - The Rose has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast

The criticism most often leveled against Matmos is that the concepts (or, some would say, gimmicks) behind their songs are often weightier than the songs themselves. Or, to put it another way, in the past for every "Lipostudio... and So On", you'd also get a "For Felix (And all the Rats)." You could respect the ideas and the incredible production, and still not find all of their music listenable.

The Rose has Teeth... is sitting up near the top of this list not merely because it's the best, most consistent album Matmos have recorded. (There's only one dud this time around, the nightmarish wind-tunnel rush of "Germs Burn for Darby Crash"). It's also one of the most interesting and diverse listens that anyone bothered to give us in 2006. You get the frenetic beats of "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein," the seedy backroom grind of "Public Sex for Boyd MacDonald," and the wall of chattering adding machines and typewriters of "Rag for William S. Burroughs." I've already carried on enough about the hilarious "Tract for Valerie Solanos" - probably the best job Matmos have done of integrating the means and the theory of a song. But again: you don't need to know that Drew Daniel recorded the sound his semen makes sliding down a test tube (and just what does that sound like anyway?) to enjoy the mysterious and slightly-creepy "Semen Song for James Bidwell." On the flip side, while knowing some of William S. Burroughs' biography will help you understand the narrative behind the gunshot that marks "Rag"'s first transition, you can also just sit back and listen to (and marvel at) the way analog machine sounds give way to increasing layers of more "traditional" percussion. Ultimately, the album is a success because at its center is solid songcraft and unparalleled technical skill. Destroy the male sex? Not as long as they keep giving us twisted pieces of art like this one.

1. Boris - Pink

There's something you should know about Pink before you listen to it: the album is loud, and it is meant to be played loudly. This is not music that you can throw on as background to anything. It rewrites the rules of the universe such that infinite layers of feedback, frenetic drumming, joyously shouted vocals, and more guitar riffs than you can shake an effects pedal at, all emerge from the finite space of your speakers and fill the finite space that you inhabit. And then they grab your body and they shake you, hard. The wall of feedback that shimmers on top of most of these songs isn't the result of shoddy production - it's the sound of guitars being pushed to their limit to channel as many ideas at once as possible. That diversity exists as much within the songs as between them: "Farewell" and "Just Abandoned My-Self" are the mini-opuses that frame the album, but between them you get deep doom ("Blackout"), melodic psych freak-outs ("Pseudo-Bread", "Woman on the Screen"), and a bit of bluesy Zeppelinesque sludge ("Afterburner"). For all that Pink is unrelentingly heavy, however, it's never a burden. There's a joyous energy and an infectious playfulness throughout most of the album that makes the genre term "metal" completely inapplicable. More than any other album from last year, this one is guaranteed to put a smile on my face, and that's why - even though it was actually the last of these ten albums that I bought - it's my favorite from 2006.

As a good scientist, it behooves me to identify the population from which these ten were chosen. Here's a list of all the other albums I bought in 2006, split into two groups - the "second-strings" that I'd have been writing about if I'd chosen some other arbitrary multiple of 5, and the albums that really didn't have a chance of making my list (for all that most of them included at least one song that I loved).

Figurines – Skeleton
50 Foot Wave – Free Music
Lansing-Dreiden – The Dividing Island
Mission of Burma – The Obliterati
Ellen Allien & Apparat – Orchestra of Bubbles
Excepter – Sunbomber EP

Erase Errata – Nightlife
Junior Boys – So This is Goodbye
El Perro del Mar – El Perro del Mar
Islands – Return to the Sea
Be Your Own Pet – Be Your Own Pet
Asobi Seksu – Citrus
Liars – Drum’s Not Dead
Mew - …and the Glass-Handed Kites
CSS – Cansei de ser Sexy
Oxford Collapse – Remember the Night Parties
Girl Talk – Night Ripper
Telepathe – Farewell Forest
Mylo – Destroy Rock n’ Roll
Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America
Sonic Youth – Rather Ripped