The Runners Four
Label: Kill Rock Stars/5RC
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Runners Four, The
No wonder Deerhoof are a contemporary college-hipsters’ delight: They’re coed, they can’t commit themselves to a stylistic major and they put out, put out and then put out some more – The Runners Four is the quartet’s sixth release in four years. Twenty exacting-yet-open-ended term papers deep, it’s the auditory equivalent of an extremely colorful but inconsistently plotted graphic novel, bassist Satomi Matsuzaki’s twee woman-child vocals trading off and sometimes cohabiting with drummer Greg Saunier’s tender piping. “After Me the Deluge” takes a straight razor to bluesy licks, spilling out a pool of placid Matsuzaki plasma and noisy torrents of spastic rock-out. The plaintive “Odyssey” bobs along a stream of incandescent, Xanax-ed strumming and winsome, upper-register daydreaming, while guitarists John Dieterich and Chris Cohen pit their weapons against each other in barbed-wire, skronk-pop fashion on “Twin Killers.” If you can’t hang, it’s possible that you hate fun.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.