Dan Deacon (the bespectacled, bearded wielder of midi synths) has finally returned since 2012’s oddball electro-pop record America. His distinct output is always an exhilarating mess of avant-garde and delirious pop— not quite out there enough to be truly avant-garde but too weird to fit under the pop umbrella. The arrival of his fourth album Gliss Riffer is possibly the yellow brick road towards a utopic fantasy realm where these two disparate genres can exist; where the mind melting weirdness of avant-garde instrumentation can live alongside adventurously giddy pop melodies. The upshot is an album bursting at the seams with intricacy, a puzzle of sounds you could piece together with head spinning infinitude.
Swapping the huge orchestration of previous albums like America, Gliss Riffer marks a sea change from the twitchy can’t sit still pace of Deacon’s previous alchemic work. The most obvious feature being the vocals that lace this album together, all his own chameleonic voice, including the beautifully warped feminine sounds on maximalist pop opener ‘Feel the Lightening’. It’s this landslide sense of shift and change that defines this record more than anything. Each disembodied piece of the sonic palette recycles itself into something else. For electronic music and all its criticisms for being cold and alien, Deacon makes the digital strangely organic. ‘When I was Done Dying’ is a skittering example of this: primitive beats and percussive chants entwines with twinkling dial tone sounding synths to make the origin of the sounds unclear. This is also revisited again in the repetitious tribal vibe of penultimate jam ‘Take it to the Max’.
Each track swells with dense aural tricks and wizardry, much like the sample heavy material of Panda Bear. Clear standout ‘Meme Generator’ is a brilliant copy and paste instrumental of ethereal new age synths and a data rush of clipped vocal samples. If proto-PC music was a thing that didn’t sound like a load of pretentious journalistic rubbish then this would be it. ‘Mind on Fire’ continues this odyssey into the abyss of the digital world. In what could be compared to the grand electronics of someone like Vangelis, glimmering digital walls of sound layer to genuinely awe inspiring effect.
Although Gliss Riffer sonically pulls all the punches, it’s important to note the personal context to the record. While most of Deacon’s music is always a spectacle, the vocal emphasis on this record offers an added dimension of emotional weight. The bouncy infectious glitch of ‘Learning to Relax’ builds on the melancholic focal refrain of “just take me out of my mind” among other lines blurred by heavy vocoder. Confessional but not contrived, the lyrics on Gliss Riffer float about like errant thoughts, yet still manage to seriously resonate.
Overall Gliss Riffer is Dan Deacon’s intrepid step back into his own uniquely crafted universe with sonically dexterous skill and a renewed sense of adventure. It refreshingly keeps things interesting without verging into tedious self-indulgent territories, and above all makes for an incredibly listenable album.
7Bit’s 7Word Review: Intrepid electronic music for the digital age
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