Back when Dan Deacon was touring in support of his 2007 breakthrough album, Spiderman of the Rings, he set his one-man show up in the middle of the floor, using his own awkwardly frenetic dancing to draw the audience in to the action, namely the ecstatic dance music pumping out of his sequencers. Having expanded his lineup to a 15-piece live ensemble for Monday's show at the Majestic in support of this year's excellent Bromst, Deacon was up on the stage again with no trouble firing up the packed crowd for a show that was part concert, part group therapy session and part all-night hokey-pokey.
Teeth Mountain led off the night's triple bill with a hypnotic mix of tribal percussion and drone music that slowly built over the course of a pair of long set pieces. Fellow Baltimoreans Future Islands followed with a set of drum machine-driven new wave that prepped the audience for Deacon's own up-tempo electronica.
After leaving the crowd in the dark to listen to Enya and Blind Melon for several minutes, the ensemble took the stage and launched into ""Get Older,"" the final and perhaps most charged song on Bromst, beginning a set dominated by the new matieral.
Eschewing conventional stage effects, the show's visual spectacle was provided by a collection of homemade lighting rigs synched up with Deacon's jerry-rigged synthesizers. Between the flurry of activity on stage, the hyperactive crowd and the music itself, the effect was ecstatic as the group moved on through ""Red F"" and ""Paddling Ghost.""
Throughout the night, what happened between songs left as much of an impression as any other part of the performance. First officiating a dance-off and later organizing a venue-sized, rapidly spinning mosh pit, the interaction between Deacon and the audience defined the show, culminating with a massive human bridge leading all the way out of the Majestic, onto the street and then back into the venue once more. A task which, given the hundreds of people involved, went surprisingly smoothly.
The concert reached a sweaty fever pitch as the last of the bridge participants made their way back down onto the floor and Deacon's ensemble kicked off ""The Crystal Cat,"" the night's only song drawn from Spiderman of the Rings and a kaleidoscopic fan-favorite. At this point, a mix of overstimulation and the pace of the performance itself nearly brought your correspondent to the point of dry heaving or losing consciousness, neither of which seemed very worrisome as crowd surfers sailed by overhead and technicolor cats zoomed around the stage's projector screen. It was the climax to what had already been a delirious spectacle.
Translating an album into an exciting live performance is a challenge, and one that a good deal of artists struggle with. A group that puts on an outstanding live show, then, is well worth the price of admission. Based on Monday's evidence, Dan Deacon and his ensemble might be the best show on tour at the moment-. Anywhere.
