deerhoof by josh frankel

A Week With Deerhoof's "Friend Opportunity": Day 1

19 February 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Josh Frankel

Satomi Matsuzaki is a tiny, tiny wizard who coos in almost unspeakable tongues. First impressions are often the most permanent. Pore over Friend Opportunity, in English that’s not broken (don’t fix it), but English that’s tangential and quagmiric (best word I’ve created in years). Her words feel capable of blowing glass or sharpening axes, turning puppies in circles until they’re far too dizzy to stand. She’s hypnotic with her cyclical phraseology and the repetition that she uses like a Chinese star, her best defense is a good offense. This album, from the outset is much more accomodating that most everything else this San Francisco trio has ever released and yet, it retains that sense of dementia that one can’t help but touch on every time Matsuzaki opens her mouth. It’s not that she’s crazy, no, no, no. It’s that she simply faciliates our loopy thoughts, drumming up inside us the kernal of an idea that maybe we’ve got some insane in us. Words about about selling her soul to the devil and her hypothetical song about throwing a fit if she were a dog are the gentle murmurings of someone with multiple personality disorder and then you must stop yourself because she’s not crazy. Daniel Johnston is kind of crazy. Wesley Willis was kind of crazy. Johnny Rotten and the lead singer for The Vines are probably mostly crazy, but not Matsuzaki. We don’t call those with children’s hearts crazy, do we? We do not. It’s hard not to think that’s where she enters our frame from — a sandbox, a swingset, a popscicle-stained mustache, sticky hands and a brain that never turns off. The things that she says on this record assume so many different stratas that it’s futile to really pin them to certain conclusions. They are inconclusive and fascinating. They are concentric with logic and disorder, frivolous garnish and the dead serious point, if there actually is one.

Deerhoof Official Site
Kill Rock Stars Records

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*

This is the best record I’ve heard in AGES!!!!! I can’t stop listening to it!

Jason Forrest | 26 February 2007
*

you’re review skills are weak….maybe you should take the flowers out of your mouth and quit dropping names that have no relevance.

you | 13 March 2007

commenting closed for this article




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Shannon McArdle





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