Tracks
Dan Deacon: "Pink Batman"
(2007)
By Jessica Faulds | 4 February 2008
"Pink Batman" sounds like what would happen if the mind of Johann Sebastian Bach had been downloaded onto a computer and given access to a lot of sequencers. It's baroque genius gone mad with power.
"Mad" being the operative word here. The song is beautiful in only the most hyperactive, obsessive-compulsively ordered way. It opens with an inhumanly precise acoustic guitar that is soon overlaid by a skittering synth line executed at upwards of 240 bpm, after which various harmonies appear and vanish in exacting rhythmic phases. It runs like clockwork, only more scrupulously. Fortunately, the fact that Deacon's clot of wires affords him a degree of speed and accuracy Johann Sebastian would have killed for doesn't mean the song is lacking in emotion. Warm fuzziness is an emergent property here, rising inexplicably from amidst the circuitry, and there's the same sort of fast-forward prettiness you'd get from a time-lapse video of an animal corpse collapsing and blooming into a bunch of flowers. In "Pink Batman," Deacon's underlying thesis statement seems to be: life + speed = splendour. It's simplistic, but there may be some truth in it.
"Mad" being the operative word here. The song is beautiful in only the most hyperactive, obsessive-compulsively ordered way. It opens with an inhumanly precise acoustic guitar that is soon overlaid by a skittering synth line executed at upwards of 240 bpm, after which various harmonies appear and vanish in exacting rhythmic phases. It runs like clockwork, only more scrupulously. Fortunately, the fact that Deacon's clot of wires affords him a degree of speed and accuracy Johann Sebastian would have killed for doesn't mean the song is lacking in emotion. Warm fuzziness is an emergent property here, rising inexplicably from amidst the circuitry, and there's the same sort of fast-forward prettiness you'd get from a time-lapse video of an animal corpse collapsing and blooming into a bunch of flowers. In "Pink Batman," Deacon's underlying thesis statement seems to be: life + speed = splendour. It's simplistic, but there may be some truth in it.