Bromst

A zillion years before Poindexter frames featured in the accessory aisles of Topman, there was Dan Deacon. The class president of all that’s incessantly weird in electro music, this ringmaster of aural obscurity returns with Bromst, a 70-minute musical maths puzzle of delays, rhythms, chords and glitches that will make devotees and new converts shriek with pleasure.

Like last year’s Spiderman Of The Rings, listening to Bromst is like opening a jewelery box to find a dead ballerina and a kid with a laptop and a pocket full of hallucinagetics spinning in her place. It’s vibrant, toy-filled, animated and fluid. There isn’t a bleak moment on Bromst as the sensory quality of Deacon’s work always triumphs. Whether in the chaotic, scattering ant-like instrumentals of Baltihouse or the glockenspiel drops that roll like dew in Snookered, Bromst is more experience than experiment, and at the very least, wickedly good. (8)