By: Ryan Ruff Smith
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Dan Deacon - press photo
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Dan Deacon has never been one to shy away from overstatement. The idiosyncratic electronic-pop concocter has always pursued the awesome with childlike wonder and unapologetic maximalism. Take for example the title of his 2007 album – Spiderman of the Rings. His aim seems to be to take everything that is great from pop culture, shave off the “culture” bit, and mash it all together to create exuberant pop music packed with big thrills.
This makes him an ideal collaborator for Jimmy Joe Roche, the Baltimore video artist who provided the visual half of the Ultimate Reality multimedia experience. Melancholy barbarians with huge broadswords, massive explosions and Arnold Schwarzenegger (in various roles) all burst out of the screen, usually tinted effervescent colors and twinned with a trippy mirror image effect. Meanwhile, Deacon’s music blasted out of First Ave.’s massive speakers while drummers Kevin O’Meare and Jeremy Hyman pounded out tricky polyrhythms in front of the projection screen.
Deacon himself was nowhere to be seen during the audio-visual first half of the show, but that didn’t stop his presence from being felt the strongest. The video was interesting and creative enough to be a notch above your average Windows Media Player visualizer, but a bit too repetitive in its motifs to stand on its own. Deacon’s music, on the other hand, was ceaselessly exciting, even without his trademark twisted vocals.
Whereas Spiderman of the Rings was a collection of songs mainly built around vocal melodies, the Ultimate Reality score emphasized the tension and release element of Deacon’s music. In his pursuit of the ultimate, Deacon pushed the tension to its logical extreme. The live drummers were instrumental to this development, combining their considerable chops to create rapid eight-limbed beats that would normally be considered the exclusive realm of drum machines. Sure, Deacon could have pre-recorded the drums like he did with every other instrument heard on the recording, but having the clatter and crash come from the same room in real time was the one element that made this a live music experience. It also gave you something else to watch when the video started to lag; and I have to admit that their marathon flurries of sixteenth notes were often more eye-popping than the images oozing out of the projection screen.
Confusion took over as soon as Ultimate Reality crashed to a close. The lights came on and the crew started to shuffle the monitors around. Was the show over? Or was this just intermission? No one was leaving, so I stuck around and was happily rewarded with a Dan Deacon solo set. It would have been nice if someone had made it clear that it was coming, but it proved to be well worth the uncertainty.
I had gotten a glimpse of Deacon’s idiosyncratic performance style when he was last at First Avenue (with Girl Talk last October), but his set had been cut short due to excessive shoving from the crowd. He tends to set up on the floor of a venue rather than on stage, and he emphasizes audience-participation more than a birthday magician. He led us all through some stretching to get ready for the dancing that was sure to follow, and then launched right into “Okie Dokie” from Spiderman of the Rings.
As far as I could tell, his live performance consisted of little more than hitting play on his iPod and singing through his homemade vocal effects equipment. But his limited involvement with his live sound is entirely beside the point. Deacon has already composed and recorded his songs exactly as he likes them. Live, he takes on the role of a giddy master of ceremonies or a frumpy pied piper and gets throngs of striped and spectacled kids to get their hands out of their denim pockets and into the air. Midway through the set, he brought up the house lights. We all blinked thickly as we adjusted to the incongruity of being in First Avenue with the lights on, actually seeing the people around us. He then organized a huge dance-off in the middle of the floor. It’s brilliant, really – he gets his fans to not only move their feet, but to move all around the venue. Soon everyone has forgotten about holding down their coveted spots in the front and are just concentrating on dancing and having the time of their lives.
He closed a brief but exhilarating set with the epic “Wham City.” The multi-movement composition culminates with a nursery rhyme sing-along about (among other things) a bear “who had a sick band of goats and cats and pigs and bats with brooms and bats…and everyone plays drums and sings.” I imagine that this bear’s band would sound something like Deacon – bizarre, imposing, joyous and unpredictable. In other words, Dan Deacon’s true gift is for imagining the ultimate and translating it into a reality – a quirky, sweaty, ecstatic dance party of a reality that you won’t soon forget.
Location Info:
First Avenue
Artist Info: Dan Deacon
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