Bromst

Midway through 2007, someone asked me the usual question-- the one about which records I'd want to take with me to a desert island. The first answer that sprang to mind seemed somehow perverse: Dan Deacon's Spiderman of the Rings? I certainly didn't think this was one of the best, most profound, or most life-sustaining records I'd ever heard, and it wasn't as if I had some great personal attachment to it; I'd only first heard the thing that spring. But it seemed like a lifetime on a desert island would get awfully lonely, and there was something about the album that seemed like a solution to that problem. All the happy massed shouting on a song like "Wham City"! There's plenty of music in the world that conjures up the feeling of crowds, but so much of it feels mob-like and jack-booted, or else it's just hero-worship of whoever's posing on the stage in front. Here, on Spiderman, was at least one song where the crowd felt joyous and inviting, like people celebrating the fact of sharing something. Which seemed about as essential, desert-island-wise, as a good sharp knife.