A title like America promises an ambition-- a sweeping take on life in these United States, or at least one man's personal panoramic view of same-- that people may not be expecting from Dan Deacon. And yeah, that's unfair. As carefully constructed as the work of any highbrow electronic savant you'd care to name, Deacon's music alone should clearly paint him as a smart dude, a thinker, and a craftsman.
Then again, the music's immediate, bracing surface blare, and the joyful communal whomp of Deacon's live shows, offer something more visceral. It certainly feels, while it's happening, less head-scratch and more belly-laugh. Which gets confusing for swathes of his audience. Apparently certain folks still can't reconcile the "contradictions" of an egghead dance-party maniac with an affinity for both systems music and the get-stoopidest jams in history, a guy who'd lovingly deface the memory of Bobby Darin one minute and jump on the furrow-browed krautrock express the next.
True, writers always mention Deacon's serious schooling in art music, as if it weren't obviously the structure holding up his love of noise and bubblegum from every era, even though Deacon's whole career is a testament to swirling highbrow and lowbrow together until it sounds the way a neon spin-art painting looks. If you never bothered to listen, America would seem to be him asserting his composer's chops, what with the thematic scope implied by that damn title, and the tracklist with its four-part closing suite, making it look like a prog-era concept album. And so people have been grumbling, worriedly, that this is where Deacon defangs his art by trying for Art.
Well true, America probably won't appease the short-attention span crowd, but then Deacon's 2009 album, Bromst, was already drifting toward longer durations, more intricate structures, and immersion rather than pop's immediate gratification. But a full-on contemporary experimental composition-type album is not quite what we get here, as if that's inherently a bad thing anyway: America is both Deacon's most expansive album so far, and his most inward-looking.
The first half is an attempt to extend his range as a songwriter beyond jam-master or human freak-out. The second half is his most intricate and involving piece yet, though it's trying hard to be a lot more than a song suite, even a 20-minute one. That first half proves the less successful, though at the same time the opening three-song run may be the best thing Deacon's ever recorded. For all its jittery and hyper-percussive excess, with cartoon-tribal drums the lead voice on "Guilford Avenue Bridge" (the breaks of which sound a little like Don Caballero playing a hoedown) and static all but drowning out Deacon's own voice on "Lots" (gleeful yelping in search of transcendence), this stuff flows, which is increasingly one of Deacon's great virtues as an album programmer. If his earliest records could feel like various intensities slammed at you until you staggered away dizzy or elated or both, he's grown much more assured at dynamics, bringing you in and taking you along for the ride.
And that opening run's got "True Thrush" stuck in the middle, Deacon's most affecting song so far. Deacon's singing is clear and sad-eyed, though he still can't resist digitally scrunching his voice into computer pixie noises at various points, and he even throws in some angelic back-up harmonies, which make an unselfconsciously beautiful counterpoint to the information-overload of the music. It's the middle of the album that fizzles slightly after the bracing crunch and buzz of the first three songs, which bring new emotional dimensions to Deacon's music without totally skimping on the energy that was his earlier stuff's reason for being. "Prettyboy" is gorgeous, undoubtedly, but it's still on the level of really top-shelf video game music.
It's the second half of America that promises and more or less delivers something great and new for Deacon. Where he really shoots off for parts unknown is on "U.S.A.", the album's finale of four linked pieces. This is not the portrait of America you're probably expecting from the portentous, inclusive sweep of the album's title, one of those Wilson/Parks style attempts to thread many strands of American music, from the conservatory to the vernacular, into a cohesive pop whole. Instead it's more like a musical self-portrait, albeit one on the scale of a Chuck Close painting. It's still recognizably Deacon's work; the ultra-bright buzzsaw textures would probably tip you off even if you were listening blind. It's just his biggest canvas yet.
Way before Spiderman of the Rings hit in 2007, Deacon undertook a half-crazed tour of the whole country via a commercial bus line, just himself and his gear, crisscrossing the Fifty Nifty. That's what I hear on "U.S.A.": the sound of someone trying to recreate the awe of watching the vastness of the country unfold from the seat of a steadily moving vehicle. So the whole piece moves along to a steady motorik-style pulse, even when the drums drop out. He tosses in some Copland/Ives strings as a kind of emotional thickening agent, but the most prominent influence from the Serious Composers pantheon would be Terry Riley's all-night pieces, where acid rock, early synthesizer blare, and orchestral minimalism fused into one hypnotic feeling of moving forward and standing in place at the same time. Deacon's still got too much pop and rock in him to go the full-on endlessly unfurling route. He's still got climaxes here, in other words, but at the same time the trip's as much about admiring the scenery as taking in the "wow" moments.
What America most reminds me of, at least during the second half, is Arthur Russell's orchestral music. Reminds me in spirit, of course, hardly in sound. Because even when Russell was operating in Serious Composer mode himself, there were often strong links to his idiosyncratic-unto-inscrutable takes on disco, folk, pop, etc. But those pieces were still about immersion, oblique narratives that build slowly from the tiniest details, the evocation of distance via duration. So is America, at least in that final stretch. This is still an album of big gestures and arresting noises, but it's also a mistake to come to it expecting the fizzy thrills of Spiderman or even the dark communal playfulness of Bromst. Loosen up on your need for three or four minutes of bottled catharsis, though, and there are some gorgeous vistas to get lost in here, even if, yeah, that means meandering as much as charging forward with frontier spirit.
