I first saw Dan Deacon play live in August 2005, just after I moved to Baltimore. The occasion was a "bridging-the-gap" measure at a local loft space to foster unity between the city's art-damaged noise kids and its breakbeat-loving club kids. By the time I arrived, a balding, baby-fattened fellow with a patchy Brillo frizz of beard was unraveling a mess of electronics on a table in the middle of the dancefloor. And once all the plugs were plugged and the jacks were jacked, this man, Dan Deacon, turned himself on.
What came out of the PA was a barrage of cheap-sounding, rainbow-hued, breakcore-tempo electronic noise. It felt like I was hearing my entire childhood record collection of cheerful kiddie 45s sped up on a hotrodded Fisher Price record player. Deacon himself was dancing along with a joyous palsy, singing through a scrim of squeaky effects. In a night where I'd shown up wanting dance music, Deacon had completely upended my expectations. He also made me a fan for life. A small handful of the grouches stood with incredulous arms folded across their chests and everyone else proceeded to freak the fuck out, almost as wildly as Deacon himself. Welcome to Baltimore.
"Wooody Wooodpecker", the opening track from Deacon's Carpark Records debut Spiderman of the Rings, combines everything awesome-- and potentially alienating-- about Deacon's music into 3:50 and sticks it right at the beginning of the record. Here, he loops and distorts the famous cartoon character's convulsive laugh over a sizzling synthesizer crescendo, a needling 12-note keyboard melody, and mechanical percussion that winds to a point where a human drummer's tendons would snap. It's like Deacon's switch got stuck somewhere between "irritate" and "captivate" and he decided to never bother fixing it.
Despite its cacophonous electronic surface, the best of Spiderman of the Rings hits the pleasure centers with a string of great pop singles. "The Crystal Cat" could almost be a straight-up surf-rock tune until the moment when Deacon's leader-of-the-pack goon croon becomes a grotesquely twisted helium shriek and the drums explode like illegal fireworks. "Okie Dokie" is basically "Wooly Bully" rewritten with Deacon's handmade tone generators and ring modulators.
See, Deacon makes "noise rock" that taps directly into the great lineage of batshit bubblegum pop. Spideman connects at various points with Kasenetz and Katz, Sam the Sham, happy hardcore and gabba techno, "Surfin' Bird", the twinkly melodies of an infant's mobile (the unexpectedly gorgeous "Big Milk"), the Ramones, Koji Kondo (composer-in-residence for the Nintendo Entertainment System), Max Martin, and Daft Punk. On an earlier EP, 2006's Acorn Master, Deacon covered Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash". That spastic take on a rock'n'roll classic feels with hindsight like an obvious run up to Spiderman.
But there's at least one song on Spiderman that betrays his deep background in more cerebral electronic and avant-garde music. Deacon is a core member of Baltimore's Wham City crew-- a Baltimore loft/show space and arts collective-- and the 12-minute "Wham City" is this album's centerpiece. In this tribute to his friends and his former home, you can hear hints of all sorts of hypnotic beats, from Neu!'s motorik percussion and Kraftwerk's synthesizers to Steve Reich's mallets and Terry Riley's keyboards. But as a sing-along-- or chant-along in this case, one of the catchiest of the year-- it also hints at a deep love of old "Sesame Street" records and a full collection of "Muppet Show" DVDs. Even when Deacon goes epic-- and pays tribute to the hardcore experimental composers he studied in college-- he can't resist the urge to play up to your inner child.
Like all the kid-friendly stuff that informs his sound-- pop bands, candy ravers, Carl Stalling, noise bands in stupid masks, rap music reduced to a bunch of catchy catch-phrases, and jumping on your bed with friends-- Deacon doesn't care about looking cool. (Rock magazine stylists will never get within 100 feet of the guy.) And if you're down with the cause (Wham City fliers flatly stated "no jerks"), Deacon wants you to join him in adding silly joy to a world that's been feeling pretty drab. This fearlessness in the name of trying to make people happy spills onto Spiderman of the Rings like neon poster paint. The album deserves to make song-and-dance man Deacon a superstar, or at least as much of a superstar as the Dean Martin of self-soldered electronics can be.
