Dan Deacon - Bromst

Dan Deacon
Bromst
Carpark records

Last year, Baltimore experimentalist Dan Deacon made it clear in an interview with the American music press that he isn’t comfortable with the label ‘wacky’, and that perhaps those applying it to him were more bothered with his physical appearance than his music. Well Dan, you make it hard for us, so hard. If we discount the fact that the man wears gigantic neon pink spectacles, backward baseball caps and garish t-shirts a size or three too small for him, there is the small issue of his music so far; a heavy feed of mangled indie rave dressed up with chipmunk voices and the odd sample of woody woodpecker going wa-ka-ka-ka-ka! From where I’m standing, ‘wacky’ never seemed a million miles off the mark. Sure, I always thought it was brilliant too. But it is definitely an acquired taste (more often than not acquired after one of his revelatory live shows), and well yeah, ‘wacky’.

When at the same time Deacon announced that his next offering would be ‘darker’ than Spiderman of the Rings, one might have imagined him dreaming up a negative of that album, a gloomy 8-bit cathedral of dying screams, stuttering beats and dying woodpeckers. Instead, we get Bromst, an album that is both technically and melodically stunning but about as dark as Michael Jackson’s milky bum bum. Songs like ‘Woof Woof’ and ‘Red F’ utilize Deacon’s familiar funhouse structure of building sonic chaos around addictive samples, but up the warm fuzzy stakes by using more analogue equipment. There is certainly a greater variation in instrumentation at work and a tricksier command of melody and tempo than we’ve seen before from the man, especially during the gentler part of ‘snookered’ and ‘slow with horns/run for your life’. But don’t let any of that fool you. For every slow bit, there is a bit like the end of ‘Woof Woof’ where you can hear synths, kazoos and voices saying ‘quack’ all at once. This album is, at heart, the usual big flashing primary coloured barrel of reprogrammed nintendos having sex with each other we’ve come to expect from Deacon. And it is mostly great. There’s just one thing though. What is the fucking story with the old Irish folk sample on “Wet Wings’?

Bromst is due out on the 24th of March. Dan Deacon plays Andrews Lane Theatre on June 3rd.

Future Days Festival: Vicar Street Saturday June 14th

Dan the Man: Pic by Loreana Rushe

As part of last weekend’s Future Days festival, Vicar Street turned into a hip musical playground by hosting a line-up of acts that was so ‘indie’ I’m surprised people weren’t being turned away at the door for not wearing cardigans or hair-slides. Here is a short digest of what went down in the big venue on Saturday night.

High Places
It’s 8.45pm and Vicar Street is worryingly empty. The lights are up before High Places (as they will be between all the acts tonight), and the increased illumination accentuates the cavernous emptiness of the place. We’re in tumbleweed territory before boy/girl Brooklyn duo High Places emerge. However, as soon as they start, the lights drop sharply and people start reverse-melting out of the shadows like vampires. Soon enough, there is a moderate and respectable crowd up front. I know nothing of High Places so I don’t feel all that equipped to comment in detail on their live show. All I can say is it sounds extremely influenced by Animal Collective, and on my first impression, in a derivative and flimsy way. There are sampled tribal-type beats, some live drumming, wigged out sound effects and the girl sings in an insipid, disengaged manner. Post Animal Collective bands are multiplying like bunnies at the moment. But while superficially adapting that band’s current sound might be achievable for groups like High Places, getting near the blistering creative genius behind it is the real challenge. Someone told me their EP is well wort a listen though. So I could be wrong.

White Williams
White Williams are another band I could write what I know about on a postage stamp. According to Wikipedia, this is how their record label describes their new album: “unapologetic pop that flirts with the vacuous nostalgia of the American dream; engaging ambiguous and schizophrenic instruments with impressionistic lyrics, driven by a casually heterosexual backbeat.” Ahem, a casually heterosexual backbeat? The vacuous nostalgia of the American dream? Who writes this shit? As punishment for that sentence I refuse to say anything more about their show apart from this…the lead singer does a freakishly studied Avey Tare (singer from Animal Collective) impression; same hat, same shirt, same dance, same strangled vocal yelps. Tonight Matthew I am going to be someone incredibly more talented than me.

Deerhunter
Just as I’m starting to worry that the world is insidiously being taken over by Animal Collective underlings, Deerhunter emerge to a respectably full venue. They look tired. Bassist Josh Fauver has huge bags under his eyes and singer Bradford is cranky, moaning more than once about the house lights. This could be a real disaster for a band renowned for their erratic live performances. If Deerhunter are in shitty form, they tend to play a shitty gig. It’s as simple as that. They are transparent that way. Somehow, things work out well enough. They don’t exactly bring the house down, but the clutch of new songs from Microcastle sound more alive, more muscular, and dare I say it, more Cryptograms-esque than they did at the last show in Whelans. It’s as if they recorded an album of poppy material because they were bored of drone rock, then took it on the road, realised they were bored of pop and started droning out again. The crowd are familiar with much of the new album (it was leaked a shocking five months ahead of its release date). What I hear tonight is, at the odd intense moment, like the new album being covered by Suicide, Spaceman 3 and Mogwai all at once. A short set is polished off with a ferocious reading of ‘Heatherwood’, which was sadly missed last time around. Man, they look tired though.

Dan Deacon
He does his usual thing, does our Dan, ‘cept on a much bigger scale. For those not familiar with a Dan Deacon show, it’s basically a completely interactive experience. It veers from ridiculously sweaty communal freak-outs in front of a strobey green skull as a crouching Dan messes with pedals and samplers, to his playful hi-jinks that involve, well, everyone. Tonight, these include a massive game of tag that turns the entire crowd into a vortex of sweaty bodies racing around Mr Deacon. He merrily conducts this madness in a pair of luminous pink shorts and a Jar Jar Binks t-shirt. It’s hard to describe these shows without making them sound lame and gimmicky. Rest assured, they are not. All the kerr-azy games hang together on the frame of Deacon’s music which is adventurous, forward-looking and complex. It’s also completely banging. By the end of an epic Wham City (his signature tune) thousands of mad hands are reaching toward a little light bulb that Deacon is holding up as the techno apocalypse crashes all around. Pink Floyd may have lasers and 20 foot high inflatable pigs, but that skull and that little light-bulb are the coolest fucking special effects I’ve seen at a gig. Small is beautiful. I heard this is the last we’ve seen of this incarnation of Deacon. I wonder what his next trick will be?

Richie Lynott? Pic by Loreana Rushe

Jape
Richie Egan must feel the pressure following up Deacon after the hardcore shagging he gave the crowd. It must feel like getting into bed with a spent lover after they’ve done ten rounds with Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt. He even humbly admits toward the end of the gig that he was shitting it. He needn’t have worried. After warming the post-coital crowd up with a few cuts from his solid new record Ritual, things really take off with ‘floating’ and from then on in its a beat-heavy ride to a barn-storming finish with that monster of a track, ‘I was a man’ which plays like ‘floating’’s big brother on ecstasy. The home crowd lap it up. Richie emerges one last time for an encore of newly minted anthem ‘Phil Lynott’ that morphs into a techno kiss-off as a very much alive-and-kicking bass player from Crumlin crowd-surfs through the throngs. Indeed, Jape were so good that midway though their set another Analogue journalist ended up punching himself in the face during a moment of mad self-harming excitement. Rock’n'Roll!