Dave Jacober’s solo identity away from the Dan Deacon Ensemble, Holy Ghost Party and Dope Body is called Jacober. I mastered Jacober’s debut record due out on Friends Records. Aside from being a swell guy, an amazing drummer and a great arranger, he’s put out a collection of very interesting music.

“in a swirling bedlam of melting pastels and exotic sea life of the living room tank variety. The slow churn and complexity of Brown’s visualization seems to match Jacober’s colorful poptronica and even suits his understated delivery, though all good things come to an end and eventually the maelstrom melts over him in a consuming pink tide first, then allowing an upside down gathering of jellyfish to shift into gear.” – Decoder Magazine.

Here are two of my favorite tracks from Water Karaoke:

Set Adrift
[See post to listen to audio]

Steps
[See post to listen to audio]

Instrumental post-rock band, We Used To Be Family, came in last week and completely redesigned what they do as a band. They added acoustic guitars, glockenspiel and VOCALS. It’s what a microshow was designed for! One of my highlights was their cover of Philip Glass’s Knee Play 5, in which audience members read lyrics to songs by artists born or having lived in Baltimore. It’s magnificent and exemplary of how a microshow should be!

The songs read during Knee Play 5 were:
“The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe
“An Acrostic” by Edgar Allan Poe
“Lady Liberty Needs Glasses” by Tupac Shakur
“Friend to a Friend in Endtime” by Lungfish
“Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos
“The Thong Song” by Sisqo
“Wham City” by Dan Deacon
“Tree” by David Byrne
“These Are The Times” by Dru Hill
“We Are The Ones” by Double Dagger
“Rainbow Six” by Tom Clancy
“What The Dead Know” by Laura Lippman
“Hall of Fame Speech” by Cal Ripken Jr.
“The Corner” by David Simon
“The Bicentennial Speech” by Thurgood Marshall
“Bros” by Panda Bear
“Shake It To The Ground” by Rye Rye
“Sleeping On The Wing” by Frank O’Hara
“Leaves” by Afaa M. Weaver
“The World” by Jan Heller Levi
“Burning Oneself Out” by Adrienne Rich
“Manhole Covers” by Karl Shapiro
“Dancin’ Fool” by Frank Zappa
“Crying in the Chapel” by The Orioles

Technical info: Suitcase kick drum: Beta52, Snare: Shure SM7, Drum overhead: Oktava 012, Yoon Electric: Sennheiser 421, Shank Electric: Sennheiser 509, Acoustic guitars: SM81, Cello: Apex 460, Violin: AT4033, Litz’s Vocals: Shure SM10a, Glockenspiel: Okava 012, Allyson vocals: Neumann U87.

Download MP3s - 106.81 MB

Dan Deacon’s 2007 album Spiderman Of The Rings attracted a flurry of national press coverage both for the Baltimore-based musician and Wham City, the  multi-media collective of artists at which Deacon is the center. But so much of that coverage focused on the external facts — the wild live shows, the illegal warehouse venues, the bizarre outfits, the eccentricity of the whole Wham City scene — that something almost got lost in the shuffle: that Dan Deacon is kind of a brilliant guy who made a great record.

Spiderman Of The Rings was, at its core, a bedroom techno record, essentially a guy turning dials on machines and seeing what sounds come out. What came out was surprisingly pop, with big bursting melodies, bright textures and occasional vocal chants that translated into celebratory live shows, but it still started with a guy in a room with a machine. The follow-up, Bromst, is a departure in terms of its creation, given the 15-piece band now playing Deacon’s compositions on live instruments. But in practice, the results are almost shockingly similar to the sounds he made on his own; the drummers still play like the drums Deacon used to program, and the guitars and keyboards get spliced into pixelated fragments just the same. And all the new approaches being applied to the same ideas would be a disappointment, if it weren’t still as exhilarating and intricate as Spiderman, albeit less fresh this time around.

[See post to listen to audio]

Given that Deacon’s pieces are more symphonic in nature than songs per se, it’s ultimately more movements and musical motifs that stand out, rather than lyrics or melodies. The rubbery texture of the digitally bent bassline on “Woof Woof” may be the album’s single most hair-raising sound, while the the cascading and constantly multiplying pianos on “Slow With Horns/Run For Your Life” provide one of Deacon’s finest moments as an arranger.

[See post to listen to audio]

The biggest difference between Bromst and its predecessor may be that now virtually every track is an epic, often stretching past the 6-minute mark. Meanwhile the variety in sonic textures has gotten somewhat narrower, making for a more homogenous album and, unfortunately, a more monotonous listening experience. In that context, “Wet Wings,” a 3-minute miniature composed of disorienting layers of female vocals, is the perfect mid-album palette-cleanser. Still, it’s the album’s more extravagant full-band arrangements that stand out on their own the best.