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Feb 23, 2015 Web Exclusive By Billy Hamilton

Dan Deacon doesn’t do things by halves. The Baltimore-based electro producer has spent a career throwing himself into grey-matter clattering sonic spectrums that sound like they’ve been rewired by some madcap genius inventor. A half-assed Dan Deacon record simply doesn’t exist. Neither does a dull one.

Gliss Riffer, Deacon’s latest LP, doesn’t disappoint. More electronic leaning than America, the crunching synths of Deacon’s early output are back to the fore. The sinewing, glitching chaos of “Sheathed Wings,” in particular, resembles a throwback to his breakout Spiderman of the Rings.

This multi-textured melee chimes across these eight tracks. Yet Deacon is much more cultured than the hedonistic jaunts suggest. Each cut is massaged with the global sense of rhythm that first reared its head on 2009’s excellent Bromst, producing a rich tapestry of arrangements that finds Deacon extending his reach further still.

“Mind on Fire” wobbles and thrums to cascading African percussion, while “Take it to the Max” is a looping, key spangled build of sun-rising electronics. Album swansong “Steely Blues” is a culmination of all that’s gone before it—a slow-building ethereal drone that awakens to twinkling effects before exploding as a swathe of shuddering techtronica.

Most impressive is the rhythmic persuasiveness of “When I was Done Dying.” Here, Deacon leads us into a journey of naive discovery that’s masterfully told through his structureless stream of consciousness. Musically, it’s divine; a flutter of percussion and voluptuous synth waves all brilliantly aligned.

The fact that Dan Deacon is still creating records with such intensity is impressive in itself. But to be able to deliver such a sonically beguiling affair as takes something else. What that something is, only Deacon knows. But whatever it is, it’s working. (www.dandeacon.com)

Author rating: 8/10