DAN DEACON
SPIDERMAN OF THE RINGS
CARPARK
WORDS: AW HENDERSON

The thing that makes Dan Deacon so great is he doesn't give a fuck. He's as self-conscious as a 6-year-old at Disneyworld, which is a good place to look for the building blocks of the sound on his new album. Spiderman of the Rings is made out of Kool-Aid waterslides, cotton candy clouds with smiley faces on them and go-carts stuck in AWESOME mode, with giant-headed cartoon characters cavorting backwards and forwards everywhere without looking where they're going. Essentially a day in the life of Dan Deacon's imagination, and much like all the other releases with silly names he has issued, it's as fun to listen to as it is write metaphors about.

What sets Spiderman apart from the Deacon catalogue, other than the stronger songwriting, is the sense of pace and place he has instilled it with. The album expands, like a big pink chewing gum bubble, from the beginning warped Woody Woodpecker sampling through a multi-chambered epic into the jitterbug electro-crush of the rest of the album, but it never pops. Instead, the bubble breaths from one track into the next, heightening in intensity but allowing space to compress and re-tense the leg muscles for the next spring. As the album's highlight, "Wham City" (a song I could easily spend the entire review talking about), marches into the pre-verbal beauty of "Big Milk," the album's rollicking meter starts to make sense, to anchor Deacon's otherwise whimsical flair and shape it into something with a shelf-life beyond the novelty of its constituent parts. The happy-colored-marble sound effects that he squeezes out of his beleaguered equipment further anchor each song to a linear track that quickly leaves the world we know behind. By the time the album ends with the recursively-layered "Jimmy Roche," the anchor is being carried through the air, hung from a hot-air balloon blown from Double Bubble. This is the point in the album when I reach for my inhaler.

But when the bubble finally pops, where does the anchor fall? Baltimore, of course, where it seems Dan Deacon has found his home. The fabled artistic fortress of Wham City, paid tribute in the song of the same name, is something of a crucible for circuit-bendin', goggle-wearin', acid-trip mimickin' electronic pop these days. Bands like Video Hippos and Santa Dads, as well as film and visual artists who share Deacon's aesthetic, have come together to lend Baltimore a taste of their peculiar kaleidoscope flavor, and a sense of polychromatic camaraderie is tangible in their work. Deacon's music doesn't sound like one weird/crazy/brilliant guy making music with an old beat-up Casio anymore-- it sounds like a baker's dozen of them. That's the secret ingredient of Spiderman: beautiful freaks finding freaks beautiful. The tangled community that has grown up around Deacon and his arts collective is a rare and wonderful thing, and his music benefits from the sense of togetherness-via-shared-oddity that permeates it.

Like Kidz Bop covering Kraftwerk, "Wham City" features a rainbow repetition of catchy pop hooks and accelerated rhythms that, on their own, would be great brain-candy. They're made memorable, though, by an anthemic chorus, sung by who knows how many of the City's residents, over and over again throughout the song: "We have a mountain enclosed/ There is a fountain/ Out of the fountain flows gold/ Into a huge hand," they innocently self-aggrandize, before proceeding to re-imagine themselves as their fantasy alter-egos: a "sick band of ghosts and cats and pigs and bats and rats that play big dogs like queens and kings and everyone plays drums and sings." The entire album plays like an homage to itself, in the best way. With enthusiasm like that, how can you argue against them?