Dan Deacon: Spiderman of the Rings
Download “The Crystal Cat” (from Spiderman of the Rings)
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Release Date: May 8, 2007
On the surface Spiderman of the Rings may sound like the kind of record where anything goes. High-pitched voices sing without intending to be pretty, and sporadic noises from the world of pixels are found in plenty. The playfulness of it all has been so skillfully whipped that glaring choices seem to have been made out of pure silliness. There’s enough evidence, however, to indicate otherwise; that this is a record where a particular aesthetic has been sought, be it a seemingly bizarre one, and classically-trained Dan Deacon has expertly brought it under his control so he may let it loose.
But what’s the story here? Who’s to know, though one might take a stab at it. There are a variety of voices that make an appearance, some more than once. One of these we assume to be Deacon’s own. It sings a duet in “The Crystal Cat” with an extremely high-pitched one, which we naturally think is the cat’s. Other normal human voices make rare appearances, most strongly in the big chorus of the eleven-minute-long “Wham City.” This song, the album’s most remarkable, is as revealing as it gets. We know there is a city whose tour it involves. The chorus makes an introduction in a fascinating outburst of rhymes. We are told of a mountain, a castle, a fountain, a big hand, a bear with a bag of a ton of things, including brooms and bats and cats! They leave us to a long musical interlude as if for a solitary exploration, after which a single voice emerges as though it were rising in revelation, joining the friendly chorus eventually.
The album begins with the menacing-yet-melodic laughter of Woody Woodpecker in a constant loop, whose slowed-down version reveals how much like a song the trademark laughter is. This dream-like repetition is a gateway to the world Deacon has created. “Wham City” is somehow central to this world, but there’s a universe to which it belongs, and it’s got an entire landscape of its own. If the dreamy, wordless melodies of “Pink Batman” are the landscape, “Big Milk” is the sky at night. It’s got soothing, twinkling sounds to which stars may blink, but amongst watery drops there are also radio signals shooting through the galaxy. “Okie Dokie” introduces us to the squeaky gang that is quite jubilant about its leader’s possession of a rattle snake gun. These must truly be the citizens of Deacon’s world, even if they’re the rodents whose masses make the earth squirm through the night, because they re-apear in “Trippy Green Skull” and “Snake Mistakes” with uncontested confidence. In the former they are joined by a monk-like group, and in the latter someone’s been led to boast, perhaps in intimidation: “My dad is so cool, he is the coolest dad… he would break you up if I asked him to”.
There is an outward appearance to music that traditional training deals with, and then there is the spirit of it which tends to be intuitive. Deacon seems to have applied spirit to the album’s appearance and the fruits of his classical training to its spirit. This means the same thing as having the rings, but being the Spiderman, not the Lord, of them. The last track “Jimmy Joe Roche,” named after his artist-friend, leaves us with a reaffirmation: Spiderman of the Rings is epic without being serious.
NYC Dates:
May 5: Brooklyn, NY @ Raven’s Den ($tba)
May 12: New York, NY @ The Mercury Lounge ($8)
