Deerhoof play with a primal abandon and molten group chemistry that remains untamed since the band's early days. Still, at nearly twice the length of their previous albums, "The Runners Four" is more complex and challenging than anything they've recorded. This is more than rock; it's a wholesale rewrite of the rock and roll dictionary. Deerhoof herald the era of the defiant DIY album. The Runners Four: a quartet of racers, chasers, messengers, even smugglers, gleefully smashing through outmoded boundaries, bearing gifts of sonic contraband. This is Deerhoof's magnificent autobiography.
Deerhoof
The Runners Four
[Kill Rock Stars; 2005]
Rating: 9.0
Pitchfork: You opened for Wilco recently. How was that?
Greg Saunier: When I was in the audience, watching their show, they would start a song, and people next to me would start hugging each other because they loved that song. And I thought that was something that I would really aspire to. To do something where music becomes-- and this sounds ridiculous or pretentious or something-- but where music becomes more than just good music.
* * *
Any band taking cues from Wilco-- let alone the best band in the world-- that's hard to stomach. Says Dominique Leone, "You don't always have to sound poignant to make poignant music." But I appreciate Deerhoof's challenge here: to comb hair without cutting it, to wash face without popping all the pimples, to be the best band in the world, but beyond that, to be the most lovable, too.
So tomorrow, Deerhoof put on their Tuesday best and release their first straight-up guitar-rock album-- short, dense songs packed into familiar forms, full-bodied vocals for unabashed, often gut-punching melodies, less herk-jerk, less of that house-of-cards spirit that coursed through Reveille and Apple O. Some people will miss that.
Milk Man, Pt. 2? Not really. Deerhoof aren't holding back here so much as redistributing their energies; where before we found cute in the grotesque, now the opposite. My offer: I'll concede that Milk Man was poppy, watered down, desperate love shit if you'll actually listen close to The Runners Four and realize that it's onto something else entirely-- by turns jubilant, confused, afraid, angry, sad, relieved, all pretty poignant, yes. They've made us a hugging record. Nothing ridiculous or pretentious about hugging.
Almost twice the length of their other LPs, The Runners Four plays not as one big song, but as three swoops of six or seven. That first swoop (from "Chatterboxes" to "Odyssey") might dishearten the diehard, at least initially. Drummer Saunier, famed for his freakish battery, barely touches the set, but in his absence we get compositional tension, which is sometimes more intense than Saunier's top-down. Dueling guitar lines bristle close in the rub ("Chatterboxes"), and harmonics stab away at Chris Cohen's existential pirate ballad "Odyssey": "Pirates on an odyssey/ We ask the captain 'What will be?'" Now pirates count for some of the biggest douchebags this world has ever seen, but they get scared, too-- people forget that.
"Wrong Time Capsule" starts swoop #2 with Runners' most on-the-sleeves guitar riff, a cry to echo singer Satomi's dejected message in a bottle: "Don't forget me yesterday/ 'Cause today's no place to stay." The trill stays fever-high with unison chants on guitars and vox ("Scream Team"), folksy-bluesy confessions/comeuppance on "After Me the Deluge" ("Middle love I did do you harm whenever I want to"), up to "Siriustar", Deerhoof's sparse-to-gigantic guitar anthem, like nothing they've written before. I think it's about a werewolf.
The next third dips into more emotionally resonant stuff-- the furthest capitulation of Deerhoof's animalism so far, where lyrically they can guess the emotions of all things living (people being chased by spies) or non-living (lightning rods). We can wonder, as they do, if lemons are sad when we eat them, stuff like that, though Deerhoof make sure to push things inside-out, rescuing something human from the rumination. Runners' gut-puncher, the third swoop rounds out with "You're Our Two" as needly guitar lines sandwich Satomi's image-heavy paranoia: "Cast afloat on icy water/ Can I really leave?" then "Ark sailing/ Believe all fools or die."
A somber if slightly perplexing note to end on, it's the right one for this album. But Deerhoof don't leave us there. Instead they give us "RRRRRRight", a chirpy, stark, primitive cut a la "Come See the Duck". Of course, after an album so unafraid to ask for our love, Satomi's ga-gas and oompah-oompahs feel somewhat inconsequential. Then I saw Deerhoof play the song live and understood why they have it here: The song is ginger, a palette cleanser as much for us as for them. Love what happened, they ask, forget what happened, start all over again.
-Nick Sylvester, October 10, 2005
Review by Heather Phares
After seven albums' worth of gleeful pandemonium, Deerhoof calm things down a bit with The Runners Four, a collection of songs that are even more restrained than Milk Man and the Green Cosmos EP. Perhaps trying for the unpredictability of their earlier work got too, well, predictable for the band. Even though the manic intensity that characterized work like Reveille is missed a little here, The Runners Four is still a far cry from typical indie rock; in fact, it sounds more like one of Deerhoof's older albums played at half-speed than anything else. Most importantly, the joyful creativity that radiates from all of the band's other work is here in spades, too: it's hard not to smile at "Twin Killers"' zigzagging riffs or "Scream Team"'s giddy, girl-boy vocals. At the beginning of the album, there's more of an emphasis on pretty, relatively gentle songs like "Chatterboxes," "Odyssey," and "Vivid Cheek Love Song," although even these tracks have enough shifts in tempo and dynamics to prove that they're the work of Deerhoof. However, as The Runners Four unfolds, it gets progressively louder and more overtly playful, with "Spirit Ditties of No Tone," "Lightning Rod, Run," and "O'Malley, Former Underdog" providing some of the album's most irresistible moments. By the time "You're Our Two" and "Rrrrrrright" close out the album, Deerhoof are back to the sugar-buzzing rock of their early days. In between these extremes are the pretty pop of "Running Thoughts" and noisy, experimental cuts such as "Midnight Bicycle Mystery" and "Bone-Dry," which recalls the more elliptical moments of Deerhoof offshoot Curtains. While it's not as clearly conceptual as Milk Man was, The Runners Four also seems to tell an extended, if fractured, story involving murderous twin beauties, spies, pirates, and smugglers. There's a lot to look and listen for in The Runners Four; it's Deerhoof's longest, most eclectic work yet, and more proof that the band can expand its sound without losing what makes it special.
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