AOTW - Bromst by Dan Deacon

Ok guys, I want you to trust me on this one. I'm starting this off with a big caveat - I am well aware that this may not be to everyone's taste. I am also aware that some people may get halfway through track two and curse my name eternally (Lord knows, Mrs Frod did, stomping upstairs in high dudgeon muttering darkly about 'proper music...'). BUT I also am aware that everyone liking something isn't the point and would hope that if I give you my marker on this one then not all of you will call it in at the same time.

So Dan Deacon, then. To give you a few facts, Deacon is an electronic musician who is central to Baltimore's Wham City convocation of artists and scenesters. He is a balding, bespectacled, rotund fellow who has a masters in Electronic Composition and Production (or something). He is, to say the least, qualified.

Bromst is Deacon's second album proper, following the euphoric whimsy of 2007's Spiderman of the Rings, and it is, to say the least, incredible. It came out a few months ago now and has slowly but surely gained an awful lot of plaudits. Whilst not to everyone's taste (I have seen boards on Drownedinsound claiming it to be one of the worst albums of all time) the record hits a different nerve to anything else I have heard recently. It sees a move away from jokey samples and irritating loops and into a much broader, more emotional space, at times inviting favourable comparison with electronic art/music pioneers like Reich and Glass.

Deacon works with tools and with sounds that are often recognisable - simple chord progressions ripped from classic surf rock, chanted vocals, layered drums, buzzing synths - but splices them together or deconstructs them in such a way as to be something strangely other. Many of his songs sabotage flagrant catchiness with batshit electronic squall - see particularly track two, Red F, which many listeners find a little too awkward and yet which seems to me to fuzz directly to that part of the brain that feels like falling in love - and his use of heavily treated vocals calls to mind Battles or The Knife and their creation of difficult, different music. The closing track, Get Older, also veers toward the difficult, repeating and repeating and building and building, it strives to dangle the listener ever closer to a release but, like Justice's Stress, makes you work damn hard to get there.

So if all this sounds a bit like art as music as punishment as art, then you might be a bit right. But allied to this there are some simply amazing tunes. See how the opener, Build Voice, literally builds from silence to something awesome. See how Surprise Stefani ends in the most shimmeringly glorious way possible. See how Wet Wings manipulates the old spiritual into something altogether quite affecting. See how Woof Woof then takes this mood and shoves it aside with one hell of a bass riff.

On top of all this Snookered is, almost certainly, my favourite song of the year so far and Slow With Horns/Run For Your Life makes me want to marry Mrs Frod all over again so that she can walk down the aisle to it. I don't want to overstate it too much, but I feel that this album succeeds on so many levels - as pop, as art, as noise, as dance, as emotionally resonant indie - that it truly is the work of someone special. I hope that some of you agree.

PLUS, if reports are to be believed, his live show (man stands at table of taped-up electronics in middle of crowd, 16 musicians join him, crowd play party games and join in with songs) is something else. He plays Manchester tomorrow night and ULU in London on Friday night. There are tickets still available and mine only cost £11. I am practically weeing with anticipation.

Enjoy. I hope.