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Dan Deacon, "Spiderman of the Rings"
Dan Deacon is classically-trained in electro-acoustic composition, but chooses to make clunky, junky electronica using bargain basement gear and canned Casio keyboard beats. He wears goofy oversized sunglasses and performs illuminated by a glowing green Halloween skull. The music is deceptively simple: low-fi, wonky outsider pop that reveals layers of fascinating texture and occasional side-trips into joyful postmodern pastiche.
Dan Deacon has toured relentlessly for the past few years, building a strong following by appearing at seemingly every local festival and informal house gig in the Southeastern United States. Those who have picked up his self-released albums have been slightly disappointed to find that the music he performs at his live shows—experimental vocal-based electropop verging on party dance anthems—is not contained on his CD-Rs. His first release for Carpark Records finally offers a selection of the material he has fine-tuned live over the past several years. The album is called Spiderman of the Rings, positioning itself as the mega-Frankenstein-blockbuster hit of the summer, with a nod to the geekdom that clearly exerts an influence on Deacon's music and aesthetics.
"Woody Woodpecker" opens with a loop of the titular cartoon character over a swell of organs and a synthesized rhythm track that becomes increasingly manic. The track has a sort of idiotic grandeur, with a self-important sequencer melody that reaches an absurd crescendo before collapsing in on itself in a mad blur of analogue bleeps and boops. "The Crystal Cat" introduces an infectious vocal refrain against an overamped, distorted squall of a rhythm track.
"Wham City" is a longform tribute to the Baltimore art collective to which Deacon belongs, a hyperactive xylophone sequence that explodes into a loopy group sing-along with incredibly vibrant video-game breaks that rival the best of the classic SID64 and Nintendo compositions. A crazy solo by some kind of oscillator or synth dominates the middle portion of the track before the chorus comes back with a bizarre dayglo mantra: "We have a castle enclosed, there is a fountain/Out of the fountain flows gold into a huge hand/That hand is a held by a bear who had a sick band/Of ghosts and cats and pigs and bats with brooms and bats and wings and rats that play big dogs like queens and kings and everyone plays drums and sings." It may be goofy, but it's also very charming.
The rest of the CD isn't nearly as strong as the first three tracks, but there are still some highlights. "Big Milk" sounds a bit like Nobukazu Takemura's experiments with children's music, a gentle glockenspiel melody joined by a chorus of wacked-out electronic textures. "Snake Mistakes" has a groovy shuffling beat that serves as a backdrop for a chorus of electronic twitters and squeaks, but the chipmunks-on-helium vocals are a little too cutesy for their own good. "Pink Batman" might be the most complex track on the album, a sophisticated note progression that unfolds like a Bach-style harpsichord fugue, add layers of chirping synthesizer. It answers the question: "What if Richard D. James wrote music for early 1990s PC games like King's Quest?" The album ends with "Jimmy Joe Roche," a densely textured bit of Nintendo-esque downtempo junk-tronica.
Dan Deacon's music is fun and uncomplicated, though a penetrating listen reveals a dense soundscape marveling at its own nerdy magnificence. At times it reminds me of the old days of Tigerbeat6, at others like a Generation X version of Gary Wilson. The live act is still far superior to anything he has recorded, but this CD is a huge step in the right direction. Don't forget to see Dan Deacon if he comes to your burg this summer; the show is always cheap, and a hell of a lot of fun.
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