The cast-of-thousands assemblage on America betrays entirely the notion of Dan Deacon as simply a dude manipulating his electronics on a solo basis. Actually, that hasn't been strictly true for a while, but first impressions are hard to get past. At any rate, the pop sweeps of “True Thrush” meld seamlessly with the Philip Glass-lite-isms of “Prettyboy,” and literally everything else here falls into one of these two categories.

I'll be damned if I can find any running theme here, although I'm sure there's one somewhere. Maybe that's intentional obtuseness on my part. It's titled America, after all, and that's as pregnant a title as any. Significantly, though, this album is a tight package of nine tracks and nowhere near as unwieldy in practice as it might have been in concept. It's not as off-the-rails insane as some of his earlier work, but there are moments of incredible beauty on America (specifically “USA I: Is a Monster," the first part of a four track song cycle) that leave me thankful that it's not.