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.