Deerhoof Album: "The Runners Four" Release Date: Oct 11, 2005 Label: Kill Rock Stars Rock-Rev Value: [8/10] Genre: Rock Styles: Indie Rock, Post-Rock/ Experimental, Noise Pop, Noise-Rock Buy It

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review by:Allmusic
reviewer: Heather Phares
Allmusic Album Value: (4/5)

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. (...)

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review by:Pitchfork
reviewer: Nick Sylvester, October 10, 2005
Album Value: (9/10)

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.

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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.(...)

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review by:Popmatters
reviewer: Justin Cober-Lake
Album Value: [7/10]

You might have trouble accepting this idea if you're a long-time fan: Deerhoof is a pop band. I know you used to love them because they were spazzy and noisy and matched up cutesy little-girl vocals with experimental art-rock, and what you keyed in on was that "experimental" part. So when I tell you that the new album almost lasts an hour and contains 20 songs, you'll have to bear with me a minute.

On The Runners Four, Deerhoof perform pop, but they don't make music for the radio. In condensing their music down to three-minute ditties, the band hasn't sacrificed the joy of exploration. Even more than in the past, the music here reaches outward by starting with conceptual ideas that are melodically and rhythmically recognizable (I wanted to sound smart by not saying "accessible") and pushing against the structures of the pop form.(...)

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review by: Tinymixtapes
reviewer:Jay
Album Value: (5/5)

Deerhoof are one of very few bands who, besides making me grin madly, can induce fits of genuine laughter. When you're losing count of the rapid punches on that guitar chord in the middle of "Scream Team," and the only breathing room you can find is in the dizzying vocal interruptions, and you're not even close to getting your bearings, and you think you've never been pummeled harder by Deerhoof - not only do they raise the chord on you, but this one is cut short after 14 of its expected 17 strikes by only the briefest chirp of "Team!", as the guitar immediately plunges back into its initial chord, BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.

The music urgently invites this analysis, and although the details are painfully dry in print, in execution this stuff is laugh-out-loud brilliant.

Deerhoof have always been about that kind of detail (or at least, since 1997). The effort and time it would require to explain to somebody the mechanics of most of their songs makes clear just how much effort and time is put into them in the first place. Deerhoof are consistently able to squeeze more ideas into ten seconds of music than most people use in three minutes, and without crippling their songs in the least. Even though you're continually being suckered left and right by their slight-of-hand, somehow it all makes perfect sense, the kind of perfect sense we don't know exists until Deerhoof introduces us to it.(...)

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review by: Stylus
reviewer: Mike Powell
Album Value: (-B)

ast time I saw Deerhoof, they wore soccer jerseys from opposing teams. And Deerhoof are a spectator sport, in certain ways. Of course, the game's only known to the participants, and the rules radiate from tremors within their bones, unwritten-it's a volatile alchemy that causes them to pass around/wrestle the ol' cosmic bond. Operating like a set of magnets with an unseen charge at the center, they spin out of orbits, fly towards each other, and occasionally lock only to be ripped apart. There's no run-go-fetch logic to Deerhoof; when they're great, it's like a good round of guide-the-spirit, which is sort of like blindfolded downhill skiing: shaky as hell and twice as thrilling.

Thematically, The Runners Four explores that charge, but aesthetically, it often betrays it. It is refreshing that they're slowly letting go of the sack-of-lit-fireworks-in-a-porta-john shtick that pigeonholed them, but in doing so they seem to have given up that unnamable ghost, brightening the corners that haunted their ballads and tapering the incendiary uncertainty that made them so powerful. While The Runners Four is probably their most consistent album, they've always been the kind of band for whom consistency could slide, because when they were on, it felt like they could swallow the world and throw it up again with everything in the same place. They were magic. (...)

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review by: JunkMedia
reviewer: Dominic DeLuce
Album Value: --

It's heartening to see Deerhoof, a hardworking and resolutely idiosyncratic star in the indie rock firmament, continue on such a jag of creative, critical and (relative) commercial success. The San Francisco quartet's good fortune puts one in the mind of Sonic Youth - a rare band of weirdos that actually manages to take off on the wings of a charmed meritocracy.

Ambient and direct, childlike and adult, hard-rocking and unapologetically esoteric – Deerhoof's play of elemental opposites is not a new concept, but perhaps they have found a new playing-out of its possibilities. The quartet's new The Runners Four doesn't rewrite their instantly recognizable sound. Hints of The Beatles still poke around the bright, sunshine-and-children's-book imagery of vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki; monster drums still crash against wheezing organ clusters and raw, 1960's power chords. But the heavier prog-rock leanings of some of their earlier albums are leavened on Runners by the milder temperament of pop songs and widened by an atmosphere of open-minded reflection over chaotic exultation. All told, it's another triumph for a band whose creative peak seems to defy gravity with each passing year.

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