For the first time in ages, as 2008 drew to a close, it seemed that pop music and world politics might just be engaged in a meaningful, hope-inducing symbiosis. With the election of Obama, the US had enacted one of its perennial spectacular self-reinventions, apparently morphing overnight from the guise of a monomaniacal toddler hell-bent on devouring everything it can fit into its mouth, into the figure of a rational, responsible adult capable of encapsulating all the most noble aspects of humanity, FDR/MLK/Abe Lincoln-style.
This rather magical turn of events was paralleled on the musical front by a rainbow haul of epoch-defining American music, perhaps the finest example of which arrived in the form of the Fleet Foxes’ rarefied, folk-essentialist debut (with offerings from Vampire Weekend, Q-Tip, Department of Eagles, Gang Gang Dance, and TV on the Radio trailing not far behind). Here stood summarized all the humane idealism of America, all its sense of communal strength and longstanding obsession with utopian suggestion embodied in an expansive panorama of dazzling harmonic inventiveness and bullshit-free soulfulness (Motown + Brian Wilson + Joanna Newsom = one sublime time).
But then, for all its distinguished qualities, for all its epochal resonance and melodic-formalist perfection, the Fleet Foxes record is perhaps in the last instance just a tad twee and retrogressive to be an unqualified triumph, a bit too nostalgic to amount to anything more than a timely but fleeting reminder of something lost and in need of salvaging in the short-term, for existence’s sake.
Proof of such shortcomings arrives, by way of contrast, in the form of Dan Deacon’s fourth long player Bromst, a record that shares many of strengths of Fleet Foxes, but adds a requisite helping of futurist momentum into the admixture.The comparison might seem a little odd, at first glance – Deacon’s Terry Riley- meets-gabba aesthetic sitting slightly incongruously beside Fleet Foxes’ stripped-back frontier puritanism. Yet it seems, in these post-postmodern times, that to be radical and progressive might actually require some sort of bizarre temporal syllogism, as though the only way to move forward is to rediscover a past that lies way beyond and before the endlessly pastiched territory of the last fifty years. For Deacon’s is a music which straddles extremes with visionary brilliance: Bromst is the sound of technologically-driven, hyperactive futuristic excess forced to such a peak of intensity that it collapses into a beautiful prelapsarian simplicity, like happy hardcore that might have been chanted on The Mayflower.
As if to underline the canny compact achieved between ancient and modern here, this is apparently the first time Deacon has ventured away from his computer and into live instrument territory (like, real live manic 32-to-the-floor kick drums and everything! … possibly), and the resulting sense is of a visceral mechanical blitzenkrieg humanized by the addition of a lush, organic and warm underbelly. Mid-album trio of ‘Snookered’ running into ‘Of the Mountains’ running into ‘Surprise Stefani’, for example, is collectively about a million times more broad and variegated than anything on Deacon’s previous offering Spiderman of the Rings, the relentlessly repeated vocal samples somehow, weirdly, managing to sound incantatory, even soothing, against a shimmering, virtuoso backdrop of glock and marimba textures.
Minimalism has always tended towards the populist end of the art-rock spectrum, but Deacon’s is a new and exciting version of this principle. Egregious record highlight ‘Wet Wings’ invokes the early forays into tape-phasing of Reich and co, but in the context of the album as a whole, the sample (culled from a Jean Ritchie rendition of an eighteenth century Baptist folk tune) comes across as more apposite and emotionally rich than the clinical exercises in technique of Deacon’s experimental antecedents, not to mention the fact of the chilling apocalyptic timeliness inherited from the original lyric (‘The day is past and gone / The evening shades appear / Oh may we remember well / The night of death draws near’).
Again, in this instance as everywhere else on Bromst, it is as though the zeitgeist is being accessed by way of a profound engagement with a mythical past, a fierce reactive blast against the more usual tendency to merely recycle the surface accoutrements of just-obsolescent pop-cultural history. Everything about this record is vital and alive. If Deacon occasionally falls victim to a penchant for the over-hypnotic one-dimensionalism that has plagued even the most successful proponents of minimalist-oriented music in the last few decades, Bromst packs as much newly-arrived-at multi-faceted depth into the confines of its form to make up for it. This is an exhilarating development on from Deacon’s previous work, and even better, it is riven with the suggestion that such relevant and energetic creative growing will continue long into the future.
AN
The Grain 