Dan Deacon
Bromst
(Carpark, 2009)

This is the funniest YouTube video of all time. Just getting that out of the way. Dan Deacon’s eye for comedy far eclipses his ear for music. With 2007’s barely listenable Spiderman of the Rings, he made the most of his video budget and pumped the only halfway-decent track, “Crystal Cat”, with a clip of such seizure-inducing rapid-fire nonsense and made such legendary spectacle from his within-the-crowd live shows that people swore the product itself had to be a worthy souvenir. It’s not. Unless your idea of hilarity is chipmunk-helium vocal effects and sampling Woody Woodpecker’s laugh a thousand fucking times in a row over (ironically?) dated rave beats, Spiderman is a slogm and a forced one at that.

Bromst, which Deacon somewhat correctly describes as “darker” when he means “more serious,” is an enormous step up in craft, like zero to 10 flat. It’s not as funny, thank god, forcing him to care about the truly boring stuff: Melodies, arrangements, making his ADHD-like constructions earn their keep as Baltimore crowd-wetters. And it’s not all that different from his other stuff, just more tasteful in every way. Voice filters and vocoders are subtly employed rather than huffing laughing gas over the top of the mix; synthbeats are hyper, not nauseating. And there are likeable organic textures that appear to be striving for something in the ballpark of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians of all things. With push coming to shove, he surprisingly beats Merriweather Post Pavilion at its own game, taking Animal Collective’s irritating/entrancing moan circles and digitizing them for fully extra-sensory iPod-caveman derelict dancing.

The first great track, “Paddling Ghost”, is some kind of organ and gourd piano trance-pop, with, best of all, in-tune singing. He must’ve figured that if Kanye won’t settle, why should he, right? And what is “Snookered”, some species of twee-ballad? Spliced-voice traffic swarms a frightened xylophone like bees, with timbale-hard drum thuds and distorted synths eventually coming in to glaze over. It makes sense that this is Deacon’s idea of dark when his idea of fun is an orgy for Pixy Stix.

But “Surprise Stefani” is a turning point for Bromst, where we go from nods of approval and terminology like “listenable” to mouths in the shape of an O and modifiers like “gorgeous” or “a contender.” Played like Radiohead’s “Treefingers” washing over basic jungle beats for close to eight minutes, it feels like the record is actually just beginning in the middle. In turn, it’s followed by “Wet Wings”, Deacon’s weirdest cut ever, basically a synthesized Native American chant of female voices, sustaining the celestial chandelier of the last track and sending the record upward and upward, which prepares us for “Woof Woof”, built on an addictively irregular slap-bass sample and even closer than “Crystal Cat” to a pure pop song. The pitch-corrected chanting therein could be the Go! Team. And from there, Bromst never stops getting better and better, with the “Woof Woof”, “Slow with Horns”, “Baltihorse” trifecta being his finest recorded stretch before rushing back to his roots (which we suddenly don’t hate so much) with the nasty chopped-raver “Get Older” as his signoff. Bromst isn’t quite equidistant from Panda Bear and Steve Reich—he could still use a real singing voice, and how about some lyrics?—but it’s a good sign for his music that he’s no longer dependent on (bad) comedic effect to drive it along.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]