Deerhoof - Actually You Can - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

After 28 years, Deerhoof records their studio debut and it's all in Japanese. Musically, Miracle-Level is vulnerable, brave, and brimming with spicy surprises. Deerhoof once again speak in a secret code that only their fans understand, in which hooks abound, and genre is nonexistent.

After all the accolades from press and peers, what's a legendary band to do? Forget the recording studio, rent out an abandoned office space in the middle of the New Mexico desert, set up, plug in and play REALLY LOUD. Starting with hardly a notion of the outcome, by seven days later Deerhoof had found (you guessed it) The Magic a raw and refreshing 15-song wallop of an album about what happens when you leave your comfort zone.

Over the past couple of years while making their new album, Deerhoof have been asking themselves if there was any music they could create that expressed how our rapidly emerging future might actually feel. The band envisioned an album about people haunted by memory of a lost world and of every failed attempt to save it. People already living outside the system, already having practiced new ways of life required for survival-these hopeful heroes are Deerhoof's inspiration. These are the Future Teenage Cave Artists. Faithful listeners will recognize a certain alienated but transformational figure who shows up in Deerhoof songs going back to their earliest days. Take the narrator of InchThe Perfect MeInch from 2007's Friend Opportunity an orphaned but eager soul attempting to entice other wounded wanderers who might lack a home, a clan, a family, a history. But on Future Teenage Cave Artists our protagonist is threatened by terror lurking around every corner. Add to that the fact that our 'cast-off queen,' our 'maniac,' our 'terrible daughter' is watching themselves get orphaned in real time, by an older generation in power that would seemingly rather see life on Earth destroyed than let go of archaic systems of capital. Like a lot of the music they have released over the last quarter-century, the Deerhoof of Future Teenage Cave Artists (Satomi Matsuzaki on bass and vocals, Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich on guitars, and Greg Saunier on drums, vocals and piano) stitches together fragments of 'r&b' and 'classic rock' and transforms them into a new language of revolution, forgoing verse-chorus structures for dream logic and blind intuition. But what makes this album different is it's intimacy-the blues riffs and slide guitars are joined by rusty pianos and whispered three-part harmonies.In this sense, FTCA inverts the formula of Deerhoof's last album, Mountain Moves, whic