Dan Deacon / Bromst / Carpark (2009)

By Chaynes

Dan Deacon’s second album Bromst is like the best manic episode you’ve never actually experienced. It is condensed energy finding any and every opportunity to burst forth into spastic fragments that assault, while drawing extensively from, the rock-pop paradigm which found its genesis in The Beatles. Deacon seems to take the entire history of pop music, sample it, cut it up, make it faster, and loop it, while drenching everything in arpeggiating synths and vocals. This, in effect, proves how adept Deacon is in utilizing a long musical history create something new and fresh, although deconstructed and fractured.

Normally indie rock album covers are artsy, abstract, or obscure, not really revealing anything about the music inside. Bromst is different. We see a glimmer of light in a dark forest, seeming to emanate from a small circular circus tent covered in intricate patterns of purple and blue (contrasting the greens and browns of the forest scene behind). We can easily imagine Deacon’s music absolutely blasting inside that tent, swirling like a cyclone around that small circular space and disrupting the quiet forest around. I love camping, the tranquility of the woods, but that is one party tent I would kill to be in.

Deacon’s music is, at heart, party music: schizophrenic, uncontrolled, chaotic. But Deacon is not interested in just blitzing your ears with noise. There are pop melodies and progressions everywhere, Deacon just reformats the way in which they are presented. What could be a nice simple sung melody becomes frantic rhythmic jibberish, yet without losing what made it attractive to pop sensibilities in the first place.

It is Deacon’s ability to create complex music that taps into the essence of what we love about pop without sounding contrived or kitsch that sets him apart from the pack of danceable indie darlings. Deacon understands why we love pop music, but he is not willing to settle for just using guitars and drums and vocals to present it. He forces us to look beyond the conventions of the genre, breaking apart the component parts and reassembling them into a Frankensteinian pastiche of energy and motion.

It is as if every song on Bromst contains the entire history of pop music in every passage, condensed, compacted, and then let loose upon each listen. An excellent dance party-tent, indeed.