Available on: 4AD LP
On Eye Contact, Gang Gang Dance no longer sound like an experimental band, and that’s not to at all to their discredit. Their career so far has always been characterised by experimentation with some idea or other – be it atmospheric synth noise (on God’s Money), length jam sessions (Kamakura) or accessible pop (Saint Dymphna) – but here, on their fifth album, Gang Gang Dance sound more focused and coherent than ever before, to the extent that calling Eye Contact an experiment would be doing it a disservice. That’s not to say that the band have watered down their sound at all; if anything the Gang Gang Dance of Eye Contact sound more complex and less instantly accessible than on previous album Saint Dymphna. Yet Eye Contact functions as a full-length, progressive album in a way that none of the band’s back catalogue has done before.
The slow build of 12-minute opener and improbably lead single ‘Glass Jar’ acts as a sort-of primer for things to come – its drawn-out structure isn’t particularly reminiscent of anything else on the album, but it moves with purpose and direction, less freeform jam than intricate part of a master plan. The rest of the record is made up of shorter, tightly-formed tracks held together by a series of “infinity” segues, the whole thing focusing around centrepiece and standout track ‘MindKilla’. The song is at once one of the catchiest and most outright bizarre things Gang Gang Dance have ever released – rolling along on an offbeat snare lifted straight out of the UK funky template, with a latter half that sounds as much reminiscent of Kate Bush as it does a particularly lively grime instrumental.
For all this talk of coherence, however, the vocal performance of Lizzi Bougatsos remains somewhat scattershot. She draws upon relatively cryptic lyrics throughout, at times sounding fairly freeform, often letting her vocal parts take a backseat to the thick synth lines and multiple drum parts. Interestingly, the vocals come into their own when Bougatsos duets with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor on ‘Romance Layers’, a track with a repurposed soundtrack-funk feel reminiscent of warped ‘80s revivalist Autre Ne Veut or Ford & Lopatin’s recent ‘Emergency Room’.
It’s both surprising and impressive that Eye Contact holds together as well as it does, given the baffling eclecticism of its source material. It’s an album that plunders ideas from cutting edge dance music yet feels like it still owes a huge debt to John Carpenter’s soundtrack to Big Trouble In Little China – gelling laptop production and live performance in a way that few bands can pull off (Battles spring to mind as one of a handful of other acts that can pull off the trick so well). Yet it all works brilliantly – this is the sound of a band who, after years of experimenting, know exactly what they do well and, more importantly, know how to have fun with it. The end result is easily their most accomplished record to date.
Si Truss
