Dan Deacon
Bromst

Now you all know that the dream of the modern Western man with an active sexual life on Telegram is to save up to buy a new house. Sure, the pandemic played its dirty job, and the drift of home working inevitably created the Kraft cheese slice effect on buttocks glued to the swivel desk chair, but it's somewhat endearing to see the new relentless workforce moving compactly and sludgily towards the most unsettling Mondo Convenienza, measuring their status symbol by the total hectares of private garden used as a recreational space with a palm grove and an extendable acacia wood outdoor table. It's the new frontier of the work, earn, pay, demand with a fetish touch for sharp love stories on the shelves of the Billy bookcase.

And so, among design magazines and TV consultations conducted by glamorous home decor specialists, here is the modern couple venturing into choosing the equipped wall for the living room entrance with a shelf for the 80s De Agostini encyclopedia, the useless study thrown to the barbarism of the firstborn, and the inevitable barbecue area of the aforementioned garden, which in the end will be just around ten square meters because “in the end, it was better to spend a few bucks more for the garage.”

I tell the truth: I also fell into this mobster trap of buying a house just a couple of years ago, and besides spending precious energy on all the aforementioned activities, I couldn't help but bump into the last great hurdle of modern home furniture: the bathroom and its furnishings. And regarding the bathroom, let's face it, the great unknown is and always remains the toilet, first among the sanitary ware for hygienic and psychological importance. Certainly, at one time, the choice must have been more straightforward, but now, between systems with lever flush, single or double button, recessed or floor installation, and even the disturbing Japanese systems with built-in spray, the decision inevitably becomes arduous and with side effects. In the end, pressured by the services company of the specifications, I had to opt for a wall-mounted toilet with a vortex flush and a two-button system, effectively replicating the most popular choices in European bathroom furniture of the last decade. With the eyes' balls swollen with joy for the choice made and the pelvic area's balls finally deflated for having placed the last necessary stone for the construction of the coveted house, I underwent a necessary testing and soon had to rethink my conviction that I had finally won my everlasting conflict with the latest generation toilets: the truth, under everyone's buttocks, is that the famous vortex flush erupts antimatter spray in all directions, and above all, unless one takes advantage of the dual-button system several times, the cleanliness of the toilet bowl is sadly compromised. And then the mind turns its regrets to my distrust towards the Yankees and their toilets with aquarium bottoms, the ones that surely you too must have seen at least once in your life during your cheap holiday to Chicago or New York, with that huge and unsettling water bubble at the base of the loo: there, I should have overcome my reluctance towards the Americans and my senseless fear of being attacked by phantoms of sewer piranhas waiting for my buttocks to opt for the more comfortable and safer solution. Yes, I should have understood it right from the start that the Americans are right in placing the large puddle at the bottom of the toilet: defying the esthetic increasingly towards minimalism, the installation with the aquarium captures any free-falling item preventing, mutatis mutandis, any potential problem of ceramic damage. What can you say to the damned Yankees? Every time they have a problem, they solve it with simplification. And there is no aesthetic that holds or any other objective hindrance that cannot be eradicated with a good fist punch: if, just to make the most trivial of examples, watermelon seeds are a nuisance when biting into the coveted slice, rather than giving them up, they simply find a way to make seedless watermelons prosper.

And simplification is the guiding spirit of Dan Deacon, who even dedicated an album to the States about a dozen years ago, with that face that somewhat resembles the university nerd friend perpetually off course but with three programming languages on his back, a fixation for open source, and a hint of healthy predisposition to brute force attacks. But his veins are not coursing with Python blood, as good Dan has taken a vow to the sacred fire of the console, through which he became known starting from the mid-2000s with the release of his remarkable first effort named “Spiderman of the Rings,” already capable of unveiling to the world his eccentric poetics with neon hues of psychedelic pop. But it is appropriate here to spend a few more words on the enlightened successor “Bromst,” marvelously more mature and representative of that simplification mentioned earlier, with an hour of brilliant compendium of contemporary music that marries avant-garde and cartoons. You should start with “Build Voice,” but stopping there would suffice, as it alone is enough to enunciate the theses and hypotheses of the simplification theory: the track, solely centered on a childish tune, starts quietly only to crescendo minute by minute and eventually erupt into a powerful uproar of chimes, percussion, and horns where Wim Mertens' minimalism in barbecue style peeks through. These are common solutions to many tracks on the album, with no holds barred: “Of the Mountains” has the same martial cadence and in the simplification doesn’t even need text but a real babbling that halfway through the song, as usual, explodes into a noisy pastiche of instruments, while “Snookered” resorts to a harmless motif on the vibraphone to follow the same scheme and alternates calm voids with thunderous fulls. But Deacon's greatness lies in measuring himself against his world of ghosts and fairytale creatures: announced by the usual childish motive, “Paddling Ghost” unfolds even through a falsetto song directly taken from the world of 40s cartoons, with the typical clamor of nursery rhymes sung at the top of one's lungs by animated characters, while there's literally an opportunity to fall in love with the crazy jingle of “Woof Woof” that could be the soundtrack of a Disney Silly Symphony from a century ago, among pulsating percussion and little voices chanting words freely before rewinding the tape and proposing the same chant with reversed lyrics, almost wanting to recreate the universal language of infants' cries who are beginning to know the world of complete words. And in the simple world of the American composer, there truly is room for everyone, from floating ghosts to bizarre mythical beasts, crystal cats, and even for oneself, in that bittersweet final reflection of “Get Older” where it seems Dan wants to laconically take some time to look inside himself, witnessing his astonishing creations like a spectator rewinding the tape of his own life. And he remains there still in front of the screen until there is nothing left to bite off the last sticky popcorn from the family-sized basket.

And what will remain for you in the end? Nothing else but to follow Dan's dogma and forever choose the Yankee myth of simplification, giving up design magazines and reality shows offering barns to furnish in the Tuscan countryside.

Choose Dan and the cartoon songs of the 40s.

Choose babblings, choose vibraphones, and minimalist nursery rhymes. Choose falsettos and trombones.

But above all, choose once and for all your American Standard Champion model loo with plenty of water at the bottom and your personal hygiene will finally smile at you.