If you were making a documentary about people who dye their dogs neon hues and trim their fur into the shape of the Cheshire Cat, Dan Deacon would be the first person you’d call for the score. Since his arrival with 2007’s Spiderman of the Rings, the Baltimore producer has wielded candy-coated synthesizers and jewel-toned vibraphones with radiant joy, combining conservatory-honed classical minimalism with the all-night-rager energy of a Jersey Shore DJ. His music is bright, pastel-colored, pumped full of the boundless energy of a puppy who’s just been let off its leash—and, increasingly, it’s got a lot of heart. Frankly, it’s hard to believe it took him this long to do something with dogs.
The score Deacon composed for Well Groomed, Rebecca Stern’s documentary about creative dog grooming, manages to be both masterfully restrained and shot through with glee. While the action on screen is indisputably strange—it’s hard to get over seeing a dog whose tail has been turned into E.T.’s glowing finger—the tenderness of the music humanizes the women who cut, style, and dye their way to the Groom Expo in Hershey, Pennsylvania, instantly giving them a sense of dignity without so much as a whiff of patronization. The approach makes Well Groomed perhaps the most emotionally direct album he’s ever released.
Deacon largely works with the same textures he’s been using for much of his career: pulsing vibraphone à la Steve Reich, whirring arpeggios via Philip Glass, big breezy chord progressions from Michael Rother. But where his previous impulse was to pile on layers until his songs collapsed and turned inside out, here he leaves plenty of space for the individual instruments to speak for themselves. He recorded the members of his ensemble individually, giving them abstract vocal instruction rather than written scores. His touch is remarkably gentle. Where a song like “Super Zoo” might have burst into a thousand ecstatic pieces on one of his earlier records, here, he pushes the elements together slowly, allowing the song to emerge rather than explode.
Film scoring is an inherently complementary art, so it always risks feeling incomplete as standalone music. With some minor exceptions, Well Groomed does not have this problem. Perhaps because Deacon’s music is built from constant motion, very little here feels static or incomplete; even the more complex tracks, like “Scissors Down,” manage to develop from stillness to dead sprint with incredible efficiency. He responds to the turns of Stern’s film in kind: “Jurassic Bark” bounces between chords with a touch of impatience, anxious for the party it seems to sense coming, while M.C. Schmidt’s doubled-up piano runs in “When They’re in Color” sound like Bach stumbling through Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Rooms. You don’t need to see the luscious close-ups of Muppet-colored fur being trimmed to laugh at the scissor sounds in “Snip Snip,” just as you don’t need to know who is “Overwhelmed” to be moved by the delicacy of the piano, which Deacon refracts like a memory through sharp layers of echo and Steve Strohmeir’s lacy guitar work.
From the outside, the world of creative dog grooming seems garish, cartoony, and of dubious taste; it’s not an art that lends itself to instant appreciation. Stern’s film shows that it also requires incredible attention to detail, a seriousness of purpose, and an imagination strong enough to look at a dog and see a rooster. It’s as if the music here recognizes something of itself in the dogs on screen and reacts accordingly. And by trimming away some of his own quadruple-dyed layers, Deacon gives us a clear glimpse of the good boy underneath.
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