DAN DEACON
Spiderman of the Rings
Carpark
· This Baltimore party rocker’s bubblegum noise-pop will blow your mind.
Like many of his bat-shit crazy contemporaries – Deerhoof, Junior Senior and sometimes even Of Montreal – Dan Deacon straddles the line between awesome and annoying in the best possible way. Take for example "Wooody Wooodpecker," the opening cut from his newest opus. Backed by off-kilter synths and a machine-gun drum machine, the main elements of the track are two looped versions of the cartoon bird’s trademark chuckle, repeated about 7000 times.
"The Crystal Cat" is a catchy, twinkling electronic rave-up that would be the perfect soundtrack for a Japanese motorcycle racing video game, if it wasn’t for the pitch-shifted vocals that make Deacon sound like Alvin The Chipmunk. Thankfully, these Day-Glo squeals fit perfectly with the music, unlike the similar singing effects on the new Battles album, that sound so strangely out of place.
The instrumentals "Big Milk" and "Pink Batman" are easily the prettiest songs here, while "Snake Mistakes" sounds like alternate-dimension Odelay-era Beck, with an ode to Deacon’s dad. However, it’s the 12 minute "Wham City" that is without a doubt the centerpiece of the album and also the highlight. With a non-stop pulsating rhythm driving the first seven minutes, Deacon sings in a stream of consciousness style about "ghosts and cats and pigs and bats" "and everyone plays drums and sings." The song’s second half is similarly dynamic, except now the gang vocals have been replaced by a single vocoder. Then, when the sing-songy listing comes back in, surely even the surliest of music fans should find themselves with a smile.
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