The best show of the year happened last night, and if you missed it, I’m truly sorry. Held at the tiny underground art gallery The DeLeon White Gallery, the air quickly grew stale with b.o. and cigarette smoke as a rabid crowd (clad in Dan Deacon’s child predator specs) clustered in front of Deacon's 14-piece band, rivulets of their sweat beading into each others' open mouths.
Toronto’s DD/MM/YY played a short warm-up set, dressed for Mother’s Day in skirts and white belts tied high on their waists. “Now we’re off to have sex with our fathers!” they exclaimed. The lights went down low for Baltimore’s Teeth Mountain, whose thunderous drumming, twangy electric guitar and thudding, pulsating noise could have awoken a sleeping giant. Although they only played one 12-minute jam, wailing in near-darkness with only flashlights held over their instruments, the band’s violin-shredding was unparalleled. The last to perform before the main event were Baltimore-via-Greenville-North Carolina’s Future Islands. Mixing Samuel Herring’s guttural, thrash-punk vocals with dance-friendly electro grooves, FI tracks like “The Happiness Of Jesus Christ” sounded like Black Flag scoring The Breakfast Club.
If attendees were curious as to why heaps of vegetable-oil containers were stacked outside Deacon’s big yellow school bus parked outside, it's because they're fuelling their vehicle with it for their entire 37-city tour. (“It’s like Speed,” said drummer Dennis Bowen. “We can’t go any faster than 60 miles an hour.”) Lumbering around during set-up in frayed Dockers and arch-support sneakers and with one arm in a sling, Deacon looks like a Wal-Mart stock boy, or maybe just an uninspired substitute teacher; definitely not the ringmaster of the greatest indie-rock show on earth. Who else could whip an audience of subdued hipsters into ecstatic frenzy during a mere sound check, in which Deacon revamped the theme song of Cheers (“Where everybody knows your name and that kind of freaks you out…”) and tested the keyboard with a rendition of “It’s A Hard Knock Life?” from Annie. Deacon's 14-piece band finally settled into place, with three drummers poised at their skins, two xylophonists, a glockenspiel, a saxophonist, three guitarists and Deacon himself at his own duct-tape–bandaged wheel. He introduced himself as Lance Henriksen, and called the band a sequel to Alien 3, “starring Sofia Loren instead of Sigourney Weaver with a huge bag of those sour cream and onion Cheetos that nobody wants.”
What happened next was pure musical ecstasy, the flashing strobes and Deacon’s glowing green skull light illuminating the electric synesthesia of his latest work, Bromst. While his acclaimed 2007 disc Spiderman Of Rings was described as “great for parties, bad for hangovers," Deacon’s followup gives his sound more space to grow and mutate, with odd orchestral touches that impress upon you his SUNY-Purchase degree in composition. (“Get Older” for example, begins as a fractured synth squeal resembling the sound of a dot matrix printer meeting a friendly glockenspiel — a fuzzed out clash between old-school instrumentation and electronic cacophony, or just what it feels like to listen to a friend play Atari while you're on acid.) This was all merely a backdrop for outrageous and participatory stage antics that included having us forming the vowels of the alphabet with our mouths, placing our hands on the heads of the person beside us while thinking of what made us happiest (“Sex!” a girl exclaimed) and an exercise only described as “TGI-Jeff”; the experience overshadowed the music itself. Eschewing the staid rules of indie-rock shows (do not dance, do not make eye contact with audience, do not appear to have fun), Deacon pushes the boundaries of acceptable performance. With each mind-blowing symphony, the audience were rerouted to different parts of the gallery. As we closed our eyes, instructed to “just walk until you bump into someone, then change directions," Deacon’s trust games became an illustration of music’s humanity — any concert is just a bunch of people in a room together, trying to listen.
And so we danced, with Deacon selecting two crowd members to start the party, until they picked out partners and the floor's energy spilled over into a joyous rave; with girls twisting their t-shirts into crop-tops, jostling and grinding near strangers where everybody knows your name (or, at least, has seen your Facebook profile). Another exercise – form a human chain that spills out onto the (much-needed) cold air as others run underneath it! – was the blissful stuff of kindergarten recess. The band continually returned to Bromst’s contemplative “Snookered,” setting a wistful tone between the frenzied dance jams, and offering a meditation on life on the road. “Been ‘round this road so many times, feel like it’s skin is part of mine,” crooned Deacon through a vocoder. “This taste of milk is almost gone. Still got my shame but not for long.”
Closing with the iconic “Crystal Cat”, Deacon’s most popular song, we sharpened our claws one last time. Though our child-pred glasses were fogged with sweat and our hipster fros were frizzy from the gallery’s humidity, the audience swayed to the dreamy longing of Spiderman’s “Silence Like The Wind Overtakes Me.” The lyrics wereprojected onto a screen above — “silence like the wind overtakes me, ooh-ooh-ooh”, then the contemplative phrase was revved up to a seizure-inducing drone, slowed to a crooning lull, eventually fading out into a sweet, aching whisper. As fans wrung their shirts out, others congregated outside by the vegetable-oiled school bus to greet the band. Finally I get why people wanted to chase Jerry Garcia around America. I’d follow Dan Deacon to Tucson any day.