Friend Opportunity

iTunes Review

This prolific and highly original Bay Area band has achieved a widespread, international fan base despite the fact that the components of their music are largely atonal and undeniably strange, mixing lurching time signatures, alternate tunings and bizarre song structures with a strangely child-like vocal style. What saves the group from the margins of novelty art-music is a deeply ingrained pop sensibility and the appealing ability to make seemingly incongruous musical ideas work perfectly together. Recorded after long-time member Chris Cohen left amicably to devote more time to his own group the Curtains, the now pared-down trio version of the 'hoof show themselves to be meaner and leaner. There's half the number of songs that there were on their previous longplayer, The Runners Four, but these songs are among the group's most accessible, and undeniably their best.