Recap Dan Deacon at Majestic Theatre

It's hard to imagine that anyone who can trudge through Dan Deacon's zany cave of wonder without having a shitload of fun. Deacon proved himself to be the incarnation of his batshit-euphoric music on Monday night at the Majestic Theatre, where he and his mighty ensemble served up a surreal bonanza suitable for Chuck E. Cheese's.

Kicking off the evening (and helping out the bespectacled madman onstage as part of the ensemble) were Deacon's fellow Baltimoreans Teeth Mountain. The seven-piece offered up a set of lengthy, percussive, droning tunes, breathing life into its tribally battered song skeletons with improvisational violin, sax, guitar, and vocals. The bizarre visuals projected onto the band and a screen behind them followed the music's rising and falling. Once TM finished its brief set, electro-pop trio Future Islands took the stage. From opener “Beach Foam” and onward, the most engaging part of the set came from the spastic presence of vocalist Sam Herring, whose Billy Idol-esque rasp put an unlikely face to their delightfully cheesy dance tunes. While Herring's charmingly awkward stage presence did a good job of making up for the gigantic role FI's laptop seemed to play in their live set, the clever, sugary basslines of William Cashion really glued the music together.

When FI's set came to a close with “Old Friend,” Deacon and his ensemble (about a dozen strong) began setting up a massive pile of drums, synths, lights, pedals, and, of course, Deacon's longtime traveling companion—the Trippy Green Skull (a green skull with a strobe light inside of it).

When the lights finally dimmed, Deacon teased the crowd with the soothing sounds of Enya's “Only Time” blaring over the P.A. system. Deacon then came out wearing a sling for his right arm, as his white-jumpsuited ensemble dutifully assumed their positions onstage.

Before launching into the glitchy groove of set-opener “Get Older,” Deacon led the crowd through one of several goofy group exercises. “I want you all to take one knee to the floor, and now I want you to point an index finger at the guy over here that isn't doing it,” Deacon commanded. (That guy turned out to be Decider's own photographer, Joe Engle.) Throughout the set, the musical trickster shoved his whacky vocals through a whammy pedal and a vocoder, leading his ensemble through the better part of his new album, Bromst, with his sine-wave generator and an old Casio keyboard (among other assorted gadgetry piled up on his table). Additionally, hilarious imagery flashed across a giant projection screen (bedsheet) in accordance to the songs (for instance, a psychedelic spiral of flying beagles during “Woof Woof”).

Joe Engle

The finest display of Deacon's ability to control his audience came toward the end of the set, during an extended version of “Of The Mountains.” After finally getting the crowd to shut up long enough to explain the "activity" (and, being the nice guy that he is, later apologizing for actually telling them to shut up), Deacon had most of the audience line up and link arms in a human tunnel as those behind them danced through it. This gigantic gauntlet went from the stage to the outside sidewalk to the Majestic's balcony, then back down to the stage.

When the grinning crowd finished making their way back to the stage, Deacon and company cranked out a lively performance of fan favorite “Crystal Cat” from 2007's Spiderman Of The Rings, followed by one final burst of crowd participation during unreleased set-closer “Silence Like The Wind Overtakes Me,” during which Deacon encouraged the entire audience to sing “Silence like the wind overtakes me, ooh, ooh, ooh,” to a couple sitting up in the balcony. The biggest surprise was that the entire crowd seemed to know this unreleased song just as well as Deacon did, an even more encouraging sign of the whimsical songsmith's exploding, if unlikely, popularity.