Here are some words I'm not going to use in the following article: day-glo, nerd, neon, hallucinatory, spastic, spazz, demented, frenzy, wacky, ebullient, man-child, shenanigans, awesome. Since his anonymously jolly visage graced Street last January, Dan Deacon has become an experimental dance pop superhero - and an alt-weekly adjective jockey's greatest weakness. Here's the formula to meet your deadline: 1. Mention Dan's hair loss and weight problem. 2. State that words can't describe a live Dan Deacon show. 3. Describe a live Dan Deacon show. 4. Look up "bonkers" in a thesaurus and go nuts.
Of course, Deacon's involvement in all this is limited to supplying the material. In the last year he's toured continuously, crossing the U.S. a couple times and sweeping Europe in December. His album Spiderman of the Rings was one of Pitchfork's top 50 of 2007. His trademark green skull strobe was lost and found. And he's playing a free show at the Whitney tomorrow, where he'll be recording his next single with the crowd's participation -- an event worth the Chinatown bus fare if there ever was one.
Deacon's show at the First Unitarian Church this past Sunday began in the upstairs sanctuary with a screening of Ultimate Reality, a recent collaboration with Baltimore vid-kid Jimmy Joe Roche. The film is a mashup of clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, overlaid, turned candy-colored, mirrored, slowed down and generally chopped to bits. The video was accompanied by two live drummers and a dense electronic score by Deacon which sounded (and physically felt) like a single 45-minute crescendo. Here's Roche's stammering summation of his film's appeal: "There are these moments that have a sort of violent, but also beautiful, sort of ecstatic orgy-esque moments. The orgy - the sort of, like, complete release. Total Recall is like heroin - I've never done heroin, so obviously I don't know if it's like heroin."
This mass sit-down freakout was followed by a traditional Deacon set in the church basement - a space whose coziness perfectly matches the group-trust-building feel of a Dan Deacon show. Following Deacon's instructions, the crowd ran laps around the room and gave high fives. We constructed a long, snaking gauntlet by linking hands "London Bridge"-style. We pretended to cry together. We chanted "We are Billy Joel" as one. Pushing, shoving, scowling and jerkiness were apparently checked at the door.
And this is what Dan Deacon is about - these ecstatic orgy-esque moments and, indeed, complete release.
