There's something about the phrase "electro-acoustic composer" that makes you want to beat arts festival programme-writers about the ears with a heavy piece of sound sculpture. But an electro-acoustic composer is what Dan Deacon is, for lack of a more immediate term.
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. A study in hopeful euphoria, America also comes with that most highfalutin of things – an artist's statement, full of talk about "layering dichotomies". Don't let that put you off.
Envisioned as two halves, America is a full-on ecstatic romp with machines and "real" instruments through the American landscape. Uncannily, Guilford Avenue Bridge starts ever so faintly like a more avant-garde take on the Pistols' Anarchy in the UK, before taking a surprise detour into modal bluegrass. Then it fades into a fuzz-laden percussive workout that makes you want to punch the air with glee.
With its driving beats, over-saturation, distortion and shifting euphorics, America openly welcomes fans of Animal Collective but recalls the loving, lysergic twinkle of the Flaming Lips, and even the sunny sense of manifest destiny that drove Brian Wilson. Much of it references the evolving structures of Steve Reich. True Thrush is the hand held out to neophytes – a beatific, surging piece of pop. You can take or leave the cutesy video.
Deacon's heavy joy isn't merely simplistic, however. He played Carnegie Hall in March, then a few weeks later led some interpretive dancing at an Occupy Wall Street rally. In his artist's statement Deacon makes the point that touring in Europe for the first time made him feel truly American, despite being the sort of American who habitually eschews the corporatism and apple pie. He's part of Baltimore's Wham City arts collective and is a firm believer in mass action, musical or public. Instead of responding to the American economic crisis by turning out explicitly political songs – the approach of Bruce Springsteen and the forthcoming album by Ry Cooder – Deacon has co-opted the surges of the dancefloor, of sped-up motorik beats, of punkoid experimental music to soundtrack his view of the prairies and canyons and his sense of bleary hope.
This is not a difficult album to get; certainly, the first half is an easy listen. Connoisseurs of percussive pummelling (or fans of Japanese drum-orgyists Boredoms) will find plenty here to unleash their endorphins. The second half grows slightly more serious with a string-laden suite of songs called things such as USA I: Is a Monster. By the time you're at the mantric, tribal-psych climax of USA IV: Manifest, and some muted brass and strings turn up at the rave, you are putty in his hands. A musical reaction to strife and scandal that comes from a quarter where pretension often trumps fun, America is that unlikeliest of things: a feelgood summer album.
