Send "GusGus " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 On 2007's Forever, the Icelandic collective GusGus were ecstatically high-energy and a little out of control. Their Day-Glo party had been going on for hours and the night was still youngish, their pupils weren't quite the appropriate size, and everything sounded like a really awesome idea. Since then, Urdur "Earth" Hákonadóttir, the singer whose robust wail was all over the last couple of GusGus albums, has left the band, they've hooked up with the Cologne minimal techno label Kompakt, and Iceland has gone into a financial tailspin that makes the U.S. economy look positively hearty by comparison. GusGus's seventh album isn't quite a hangover, and there's still a party going on-- but the party is somewhere far away.Sometimes that's literal: the bass thump that underscores these six songs sounds like it's echoing across an expanse of frozen desert. 24/7 is unmistakably a dance record, but it's about the most ascetic, burned-out, pissed-off electronic dance record anyone's made since Depeche Mode's "Fly on the Windscreen". (GusGus borrows a lot of mid-80s Depeche Mode's synth tones here, actually.) Its lyrical themes are exile, bitterness, overwork, and the emptiness of sex, and almost all of its beats are muted and clipped, as if the group's longtime core of Biggi Veira and President Bongo are reserving their machine's full strength in case they need it later. The album's title comes from "On the Job", which follows two verses of work-ethic boasting with a deliberately insipid sing-song come-on ("I wanna make you happy 'cause I like you a lot...")-- in its context, it sounds like a weary prostitute's pitch. Dance music's usual strategy for dealing with hard economic times is pointed irony, and the claim that dancing is some kind of refuge from the bad stuff: think of Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money" or Chic's "Good Times". GusGus, on the other hand, are just sarcastic and indignant. "If you can't tolerate my kind you can kiss my fucking ass," Daniel Ágúst Haraldsson spits on "Hateful"; when he croons "I feel like dancing" on the opening track, it's only so he can follow it up with the punch line-- "...on the thinnest ice." (Then the disco backing singers show up to repeat "feel like dancin'" a million times, their voices reduced to hollow ricochets between the speakers.) The only hint of hedonism comes on Jimi Tenor's brief guest appearance, "Take Me Baby", and even his sexed-up muttering is run through a filter that makes it sound mush-mouthed and creepy....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Dance music that makes you want to kill Amazon Lala Forget for a moment that Iceland’s wealth has evaporated like steam from a geyser. For before the crisis, GusGus represented everything about the country for someone who’s never visited it: rigorous experimenters conveying the kind of abject isolation that presents itself in a vast windswept landscape like their own. Yet, rather refreshingly, they did it with all the conscious whimsy of Kraftwerk, rather than the suicidal intensity of Sigur Rós. Lazily lumped in with the Sugarcubes, they were actually the Velvet Underground had it been fronted by DJ Tiesto. Their sonic renditions made you dance without assaulting your body into motion, and they fulfilled the cliché of Scandinavian pop to the hilt by leaving plenty of echoing crevasses for you to lose yourself in. Their later work tended to render glacial progressions, Steve Reich-style: no matter how pumped up with adrenaline and whatever else you were, you were party to a slow-burning bash because the night was Arctic long. In other words, their music provided you with the opposite of instant gratification. But like good, long-lasting sex, the reward would be immeasurable. When we first heard of them in 1995, GusGus were a whopping collective of 12 with silly names like President Bongo (aka Stephan Stephensen). Their first intention, spearheaded by filmmakers Stefán Árni and Siggi Kjartansson, was to make weird films. But the entry of DJ Herb Legowitz and programmer Biggi Thórarinsson, as well as singer/songwriters Daníel Ágúst, Hafdís Huld, and Magnús Jónsson into the group steered this veritable nucleus of creativity into music-making too. Before long GusGus were indie darlings of British 4AD label, releasing debut LP, Polydistortion (1997), which had all the ghoulish restraint of Portishead’s Dummy and wry sample selection of Coldcut. To boot, vocalists Agust and Kjartansson spun the album with an American-accented indifference that made them the envy of the effortlessly cool. After the critical success of Polydistortion, members like Agust and Emilíana Torrini went on to enjoy fairly notable solo careers. Torrini, for one, is best known for her contribution to the soundtrack of (what else?) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| “I wanna make you happy cos I like you a lot” sing GusGus, which just goes to show it’s all about context really. In another time and place these words could be despatched by a young man with a cardigan and glasses, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and destined to end up on the soundtrack of the next indie rom-com. But this isn’t Chairlift, this is GusGus. And the song is called ‘On The Job’. It’s filthy and syncopated and more like a sexual paraphrasing of 24 Hour Party People than Juno. ‘On The Job’ is like a meeting of dubstep and trance, combining the minimalism, menace and reverb saturation of the former with the cyclically shifting patterns of the latter. It begins with a slowly degrading retro video game beep, the kind you might have expected to come from a laser blast on a Megaman game back in the day, before moving to a clipped beat which locks the track down with a binary efficiency. It's a masterclass in how to stretch a piece of electronic music past the ten minute mark without suffering from tautology or loss of narrative thread. Like all the tracks on 24/7, exercise in precision from the Icelanders, German style. Not Swiss. There is no neutrality here. Every loop and bassline employed on the album has an eye to a tension held just out of view. The other tool in the dark, dark landscape of 24/7 is the voice of Daníel Ágúst Haraldsson. At times redolent of Martin Gore, he glides over a baleful mechanical background with a smooth yet somehow anguished delivery which makes simple phrases like “I feel like dancing, on the thinnest ice” luxurious and dubious in their intent. Agust’s languid pitch is well suited to the music; although European trance is a near-constant on the album, the slow build of tension that style is famous for is never allowed to explode above a certain BPM. As soon as a section of music threatens to do so, it’s clinically dropped for the next one. So although it makes for a slow burn, a constant sense of tempo and movement is created, as well as one of being on the precipice of great instability....full text |
GusGus lyrics
|
| ||||