★★★★★
Dan Deacon's palette has widened. His trademark battery of ostinato drums and ecstatic nitrogenated dwarf-voices is here accompanied by swooping orchestral motifs, horns, and shotgun blasts of sheer sawing noise. The listener must be prepared to scale several face-high walls of sound. These are thick, complex bombardments of glee and energy, peppered with Deacon's usual idiosyncrasies...
- thequietus.com
2012-09-13
★★★★★
Goto commentsLeave a commentShare Home of the Brave Prolific composer Dan Deacon continues his move towards more reflective compositions with an album that encapsulates our country for better or worse. America can be divided into two sides. The poppier first half, which kicks off with "Guilford Avenue Bridge," dances through to the fuzzed out shoegaze groove of "Crash Jam...
- www.mxdwn.com
2012-09-13
★★★★★
In 2009, Dan Deacon released Bromst, an album notable for its dense wall-of-sound production, broad tempo changes, and oddball chord progressions. Now, three years later, many of those elements have once again been revived in Deacon's latest effort, America. However, Deacon has also added quite a few new ideas to his music -- most notably a variety of orchestral instruments and a markedly higher level of maturity...
- www.noripcord.com
2012-09-10
★★★★★
If I'm critical of a band or artist in a review, it's usually because I see something of worth or something noble the artist was aiming for and missed. Unless it's indicative of some repugnant aesthetic trend, an album that's completely awful just isn't worth writing about, especially considering mortality and the whole "spending your life in the pursuit of worthwhile things" thing...
- dustedmagazine.com
2012-09-10
★★★★★
Dan Deacon has always been a fundamentally American artist, although the reason for that has perhaps shifted over the years. At the beginning of his musical career, Deacon's America was the one cast the blueprint for postmodernism, the melting pot of cultures and traditions stewed together to create one odd compound function- America the land of the free, land where our blundered miswirings and social defects are proudly displayed as an act of pride...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-09-04
★★★★★
2009 was a watershed year for Dan Deacon. He came to wider attention with Spiderman Of The Rings in 2007 (up until which point he had languished in relative obscurity), but it was with Bromst that his stock really began to rise. A sprawling album that, in contrast to its predecessor, was (in his own words) "less about a party and more about a celebration", it put him on the map in a rather emphatic manner...
- www.musicomh.com
2012-09-04
★★★★★
Dan Deacon is a man who takes fun seriously - or at least he does fun with a whole lot of conviction. I mean, if you call your debut album Spiderman of the Rings you have to, don't you? On second set Bromst he let everyone know that he was classically trained, but there was still a song based around looping a dog's bark. Now, having taken part in Occupy Wall Street and releasing a concept album boldly entitled America, is Dan Deacon about to 'get serious'...
- drownedinsound.com
2012-08-30
★★★★★
America as a country is rarely celebrated by its off-the-radar and off-kilter musicians. Yes, you can find works glorifying specific scenes or cities, but the good ol' USA itself as a whole? Nah. That's too crass, too unnecessary, too 'Murican -- an unspoken taboo rife with complications, especially for more liberal artists...
- thephoenix.com
2012-08-30
★★★★★
This guy from Baltimore in big owl glasses used to employ mostly electronic equipment for his experimental synthetic compositions that veered, occasionally, into dodgy comedy. He has since moved into writing for orchestras, recently soundtracked a Francis Ford Coppola film (Twixt, 2011), and has now made a record - his eighth, all told - that seriously rocks...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-08-30
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