Gliss Riffer, Sunny

With Deacon, you're in the oeuvre of weird beep-boop music, lacking a better term. The whole thing would be best set at an underground show or music festival. Still, while nothing is Top 40 Radio "traditional," this album isn't totally off the wall. There's a range from electronic traditional, like a Chvrches song ("Ride the Lightning"), to almost complete aural noise ("Meme Machine"), with several in the middle ("Learning to Relax"). Starting the album with "Ride the Lightning," having a chorus and bridge and typical tempos and melodies and c., may make one think it's going to be a Chvrches-type album. The clear high voice on top of muddled electronics and garbled lower voice (if you're me) reminds one of "Nightcall" from Drive. But that's soon unsheathed and one gets several doses of no-structure nonsense.

Not that nonsense is a bad thing. The album has a lot of delight in it. "Meme Machine" is good fun, in a way I would imagine a meme machine would be. Several little sequences were earworms I found myself humming during the week, like the chorus of "Feel the Lightning," or 3:50 of "Take It to the Max." "WIWDD," telling a story of nonsense, stream of consciousness from a place without consciousness, while having some touching moments, further buttresses this sea of nonsense.

If I could pull anything together, it would be from the first six tracks (read the titles), but then there are these two hulking 7-min+ deals at the end. "Take It to the Max" I quite enjoy, but "Steely Blues" I either just don't get or just plain don't like. Well, maybe I don't get the whole album, so I suppose I just don't like the track. It's like getting a full head of steam and running into a brick wall. But all this is to say it further elevates this watermark of what seems like an album that's just a sea of nonsense.

But, curiously, like other seas of nonsense (e.g. the night sky), the more one looks, the more one sees; starts to see little bits of wonder that weren't there before, but of course must always have been? The same material brings new delights. An archer, a crab, two horses, smiling.

She said better luck next time don't worry so much.