Dan Deacon – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA, 17/01/08

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Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche’s constructivist daydream, the mind boggling Ultimate Reality, may finally shush some of the detractors that still file the Wham City collective as merely bat-shit absurdists stringing along what Deacon calls, “the masturbatory cycle” of music journalism. Last year reviews of Deacon’s Spiderman of the Rings and his whirly-gig concerts range from the hilariously absurd, a New York Times piece from last year called him “a “sensitive electro-party rocker,” to blistering vitriol. A string of comments spewed by readers on music sites like Stereogum equate Deacon’s music with something a five-year-old could drool out of the side of their mouth.

Ironically Dan Deacon agrees. Even with all the accolades and holier-than-thou assertions showered on Deacon and his warehouse-playing brethren the noisy pioneers in popular music’s umpteenth wave of constructivism are primarily here to have fun.

Wham City rejects high art and dives for the dumpster. Ultimate Reality’s blast of bright fluorescent dichotomies and tribal drumming is “practical art” that will bug you out. Aided by drummers Kevin O’Meare of Video Hippos and Jeremy Hyman of Ponytail, Jimmy Joe Roche’s paean to Arnold Schwarzenegger was a feast for both the eyes and the ears.

The night started off with a slightly creaky but feverish set by noise band KIT. The band looked like they were in high school and sometimes played like it. One song started with a particularly groovy bass line that flickered kitter corner to the light ‘70s rock guitar riff. The lead singer’s cat yowel-voice was definitely noisy but not necessarily engaging in its delivery.

L.A. quartet HEALTH felt like a grown-up brother in comparison. Using its tribal drums and rare but piercing vocals to excellent effect. The sound was akin to the Liar’s tribalism and the synthesizer fire hose of percussion reminiscent of Black Dice. ‘Crimewave’ proved to be the best of HEALTH’s short but furious set. Raging distortion and double percussion meet a middle section ripe with church bell guitars morphing into buzzsaws of noise. ‘Triceratops’ featured oscillating electronic whirs as each person in the band let out war cries. The two guitarists pulled a page out of Battles’ touring de rigueur on ‘Heaven’. ‘Courtship’ sounded like the strangest mating call I’ve ever heard and ‘//M’ was propulsive and Gregorian robotic music. It was a healthy dose of HEALTH and enough to get everyone’s blood pumping.

William Bower’s Puritan Blitzer column for Pitchfork sums up the downpour of electronics in a diarrhea of comparisons that mirrors the transgender video explosion of the pop icon turned guvernator: “ manages to combine M83 swaths, NIN brooding, Phillip Glass autism, Silver Apples/Brian Eno oscillations/trills, Keith Emerson mooginess, Mancunian dance-grooves, and Yankee-Doodle-assed 80s-movie patriotic keyboard awfulisms into a Zen totalitarian cheeseloaf that, for my money, tops LCD Soundsystem’s recent commissioned fitness symphony.”

Starting with Conan the Barbarian and True Lies in the first movement, rapid fire jettisons and jittery oscillations of jet planes, motorcycles and riders on horseback from both sides of the screen fill almost 7 minutes. The slower second movement is when the sly fun really started as strange mashups of Terminator 2, Junior, Twins and Kindergarten Cop. The foreboding music sounded like ‘Big Milk’ played as a propulsive dirge (if that even makes sense at all). Roche read a lengthy scrolling synopsis that obviously was lampooning Star Wars in a slight poke at what all the seriousness. It even referenced The Matrix and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

The final movement knocked me for a loop solely on its intensity and loudness. Death sequences from Terminator 2 blazed into molten glory and the screen went black. Deacon’s music squiggled, gyrated and got the audience moving like it was some sort of hazy rave. The drumming was feverish and at times seemed mechanized. It was all like a ‘90s wet dream set to music.

Dan Deacon’s set didn’t settle Ultimate Reality’s tangled ball of ingenuity. Along with bringing the noise, it ratcheted up what Deacon’s been touting as the importance of bringing back communalism to the concert experience. Put simply, the Trippy Green Skull came, we laughed, we danced, and we went home with a ridiculous grin on our face. Deacon set up his flashing assortment of strobe lights, vocoder, battered keyboard and who-know’s what up against the middle of Great American’s stage. There were the usual ridiculous chants to start songs. This time it was a comic diatribe from Deacon followed by a chant ranging from stentorian yells to pitiful whispers of ‘Ethan Hawke’ as the ill-fated Vincent Freeman of the sci-fi movie Gattaca. The set started with some getting to get to know your neighbor stretches, House of Pain’s “Jump Around” from the old i-Pod mini and some minor technical difficulties with the speakers.

Once the show started it didn’t stop. Four new songs, presumably from Deacon’s forthcoming album popped up on the setlist. The first new song (not yet titled according to Deacon after the show) had what sounded like a Rhodes piano barbershop tune telecasted through Deacon’s electronic hallucinogenic theatrics. I must disclaim that I may have been hearing all of this though. Fogginess aside it proved to be an engaging song and makes me look forward to this summer’s tentative release. ‘Woof Woof’ surprisingly featured a slinky guitar riff but then descended into a familiar Deacon freak-out dénouement full of blissed-out distortion and electronica. Another new song, ‘Paddling Ghosts’ was less frenetic but featured some nice pitch-shifted vocals that bordered on rapping the contents of a cereal box.

‘Okie Dokie’s’ ridiculous (and familiar) lyrics got the crowd worked into a gleeful froth before the great strut-off during a grand version of ‘Snake Mistakes’. Another new song called ‘Baltihorse’, sounded like an electronic Calypso noise rocker as a moving human pyramid/tube snaked through the venue. ‘Silence Like The Wind’ yet again proved to be the live favorite it’s growing to be.

Deacon led the crowd in a very early birthday to his girlfriend Stephanie (her birthday is in February) because it was her last day on the tour and he wasn’t going to see her for the big day. The last track couldn’t have been more appropriate for a night that showcased the talents of so many Wham City artists. The epic length ‘Wham City’ was relentless in its shower of happiness. Deacon handed out lyric sheets and the fantastical image cemented the simple ability of Batimore’s premier act to break through even the toughest hipster hide:

“There is a mountain of snow, up past the big glen
We have a castle enclosed, there is a fountain
Out of the fountain flows gold, into a huge hand
That hand is held by a bear who had a sick band
Of ghosts and cats
And pigs and bats
With brooms and bats
And wigs and rats
And play big dogs like queens and kings
And everyone plays drums and sings
About big sharks
Sharp swords
Beast bees
Bead lords
Sweet cakes
Maste lakes
O ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma”

Deacon is posting video clips of the entire tour on YouTube. You can check it out here.

Links
Dan Deacon [official site] [myspace] [album review] [20 questions]