TUNES OF THE DECADE: #8 'WHAM CITY' BY DAN DEACON

At the end of 2009, dance music as a whole is far from being ‘in trouble’. However, as noted in the previous entry on Underworld’s ‘Two Months Off’, a certain kind of tradition in British electronica of popular experimentalism has dwindled with the unfolding of the decade. What I term a significant minority act – in this genre, people like Underworld, Leftfield, Aphex Twin, artists communicating broadly underground/avant-garde values to a just-large-enough popular constituency – this sort of act is pretty much a thing of the past on these shores (though Burial springs readily to mind as a notable exception).

Fortunately, the bifurcation of British dance music into middlebrow stadium-massiveness (Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Calvin Harris) on the one hand and microcosmic obscurity (…) on the other, seemed to provide an ideal opportunity for other geographical regions to flourish.

Scandinavia, of course, was one of the major hotspots for left-of-centre noughties electronica (see TotD entries on Robyn’s ‘With Every Heartbeat’ and Royksopp’s ‘What Else Is There?’).

DAN DEACON’S BROMST AND AMERICA

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.