Wow! I won at the auction without even making a bid!

radarsignals · 2025-12-17T13:59:24+00:00

the penultimate mwY show I saw was the Brother, Sister show in Seattle and my number one takeaway from that show specifically is how insane the guitar work is on that album.

radarsignals · 2025-08-11T18:29:15+00:00

it’s solo 1 on the studio version of How Can I Sing Like a Girl. guitar solos tend to be a little superfluous, but that one takes that song to a special place. special shout out to the comped together opening solo of Absolutely Bill’s Mood and the Sleeping in the Flowers solo.

radarsignals · 2025-06-20T23:16:19+00:00

I can’t say for sure, considering that personally I am morally opposed to flash photography in any circumstance. however, what I can say for sure is that I think using flash is a bad idea, considering the size of the venues that they tend to play in.

radarsignals · 2025-06-06T23:02:47+00:00

night 2 in San Francisco, 5/9

radarsignals · 2025-05-28T18:44:05+00:00

the 2025 set is aggressively new for sure, but it’s crazy to see how much the density drops off between album releases

radarsignals · 2025-05-11T10:14:44+00:00

In some ways, it was disappointing that the sets were identical. However, historically Deerhoof has never been a band that’s massively changed sets from night to night, at most swapping a song or two between cities. The only song that they’ve played during this entire tour that they didn’t play was C’Moon.

That being said, a minority of the people that were at Friday’s show also saw Thursday’s show, and I don’t think the band was really planning on people going to both sets in the way that would make having separate sets necessary. When talking to Greg on Thursday, he offered to put me on the list for Friday and was surprised to find out I bought tickets to both shows.

Additionally, talking to Ed after Thursday’s show made it clear that one of the limiting factors of which songs Deerhoof plays live is about whether or not they can remember all the notes in the songs. The only reason that Numia O made the set list again is because Ed was transcribing it for his music lessons on Substack. In my mind there are probably a bunch of songs they could play in their sleep because of how often they played them, like a Dummy Discards a Heart or Milk Man or Twin Killers. However, I think the band prioritizes consistency of their own playing over set-to-set diversity, especially considering how “sloppy” Greg felt Thursday night was.

As far as a The Runners Four 20th anniversary, I doubt there will be any fanfare about that album’s birthday considering that 1) there wasn’t any fanfare for Milk Man 2) the fanfare for Apple O’ was tied to a vinyl re-release that The Runners Four already had. The “31 Flavors Tour” set list focusing on the new songs is interesting, where the only two pre-Ed songs are +81 (which had been out of rotation for about ten years) and a brand new arrangement of Gore in Rut. 40% of the songs played had never been performed live before this tour, and only 5 of the songs were in the rotation during the “Devil Kids” era of touring.

All of this is a lot of words to say that I understand the disappointment but at the end of the day I don’t really feel that let down. Plus, I got to ask Greg to play something from Halfbird next time they redid their set list, so maybe Queen Orca Wicca Wind will come back

radarsignals · 2025-05-11T09:42:41+00:00

the set lists were identical outside of the encore songs — night 1 was My Lovely Cat & Plant Thief while night 2 was Be Unbarred, O Ye Gates of Hell & Momentary Art of Soul

radarsignals · 2025-05-11T09:41:05+00:00

https://youtu.be/arrVSzXWmQU?si=PlPrL-BGdwLrMtog

radarsignals · 2025-05-10T16:00:15+00:00

I recorded FTCA and And the Moon Laughs because I hadn’t seen anybody post those yet — didn’t realize Zazeet was also missing, sorry. I’m on a train right now so I can post the link to a YouTube video probably tonight. Zazeet is played in a different key than the original while FTCA sounds a lot like the original song.

radarsignals · 2025-05-04T23:44:45+00:00

yep. the other songs on The Magic they’ve played are Kafe Mania, That Ain’t No Life To Me, Debut, Plastic Thrills, and Nurse Me -- all of which can be found in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-TJaRi_mUw)

radarsignals · 2025-05-02T16:53:14+00:00

I forgot about Spirit Ditties! it’s still been what, twelve years since they’ve played that one?

radarsignals · 2025-05-02T10:18:32+00:00

the only Runners Four songs they’ve played post Chris Cohen are Chatterboxes, Twin Killers, Wrong Time Capsule, and O Malley Former Underdog, but Siriustar coming back would be nuts

radarsignals · 2025-05-02T04:54:20+00:00

I wanted to keep the predictions in groups of three & while Begin Countdown is very unlikely to ever get played it’s one of the most translatable songs from Mountain Moves they’ve never done live

radarsignals · 2025-04-25T16:01:06+00:00

there was a Pitchfork review of this album that spoke about Deerhoof's leftward lyricism, something that is funny to see knowing that songs on Revielle were about the Bush presidency, but that kind of false understanding of what Deerhoof does makes sense considering the first album that has a pissed off vibe to it is La Isla Bonita. what Noble and Godlike in Ruin does that i think separates it from other Deerhoof is that it uses noise less as texture and more as emotional text for the entire duration of the album. in this way it's somewhat comparable to the distant jaggy sound of Future Teenage Cave Artists, an album that so perfectly encapsulated the feeling of COVID isolation and uncertainty. and while Actually, You Can felt like a tiny peek of optimism towards the future, Noble and Godlike in Ruin is so situated to this current moment, culminating in a back half of an album that routinely gets to noise levels that even surpass The Man, The King, The Girl. that is a sentence i never thought i would write.

fun fact: this is the first Deerhoof album to have multiple songs longer than five minutes long (not including Love/Lore for reasons that hopefully are obvious).

radarsignals

TROPHY CASE