DEERHOOF
FUTURE TEENAGE CAVE ARTISTS (MC) (JOYFUL NOISE)
"Deerhoof is a weapon loaded with the future." - AgustÃn Fernández Mallo, Spanish physicist and writer Normal is never coming back.
Whether by a collective dismantling or sheer collapse, our old illusions are being hollowed out.
Over the past couple of years, Deerhoof has been asking themselves if there was any music they could create that expressed how the rapidly changing future might actually feel.
The finished product, Future Teenage Cave Artists, finds Deerhoof in a revolutionary mood, but also haunted by memories of a lost world and every failed attempt to save it.
People already cut loose from the system, already surviving with new ways of life_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 "The Perfect Me" 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" are watching themselves get orphaned in real time by an older generation in power that would rather see life on Earth destroyed than give up archaic systems of capital.
Like a lot of the inimitable 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 its intimacy_the blues riffs and slide guitars are joined by soft, rickety pianos and whispered three-part harmonies.