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May 20, 2010 Deerhoof By Hays Davis

Green Cosmos, Deerhoof’s 2005 EP, was a wildly varied record that featured Satomi Mastuzaki singing exclusively in her native Japanese. For a new edition released by Kill Rock Stars for this year’s Record Store Day, the original fifteen-minute sequence is bolstered by an additional eight minutes of live/demo bonus tracks, all on green vinyl with a digital download.

After moving from the relatively straightforward approach (straightforward in Deerhoof’s unconventional terms, that is) of 2003’s Apple O’ album to the stylistically open-ended Milk Man the following year, Green Cosmos is a less cohesive collection that feels more odds-and-sods, though with occasional high points.

The buoyant title track sounds like a gathering of Deerhoof with latter-day Stereolab, with polyrhythm pushing along the song’s dominant keyboards. “Hot Mint Air Balloon” sounds like Deerhoof for the carnival, an amusingly mad experiment that flies from chirpy to maniacal in a little over a minute from start to finish.

“Byun,” a track that might have found a fit on Apple O’, is a great example of Deerhoof as a simultaneously ambitious and tightly focused unit, and it’s one for the band’s time capsule. The crazed, crashing “Come See the Duck” is revisited in the bonus tracks by a live version before an appreciative audience. (www.deerhoof.killrockstarts.com)

Author rating: 6/10