Send "Gang Gang Dance " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Gang Gang Dance started as free-form noiseniks; over the years, they've managed to mellow out without moving to the center-- evolving into purveyors of pan-cultural body-music, marrying club beats with lyrics about communing with the dead. Like Arthur Russell before them, they give equal floorspace to the spiritual and the sensual. By those loopy standards, Eye Contact-- the group's latest album-- is Gang Gang Dance's finest, weirdest, and most uplifting statement yet.Eye Contact doesn't kick off so much as it wakes up, easing into existence via 11-minute opener, "Glass Jar". Synth and piano arpeggios shine through the stereo field, percolating through a filter of jazz percussion before settling into a propulsive Eastern groove. It's a song about reincarnation. It's "Darkstar" and Alice Coltrane and the Boredoms in one blissed-out burst of sound. They're not much of a singles band, though. Gang Gang Dance's vision tends to require a larger, album-length, canvas. Since 2005's God's Money, each of the band's records has played as a single piece-- each song slurring into the next, building toward an ecstatic climax, mirroring the feel of a concert performance or a DJ set. Eye Contact holds to that ideal. Seven songs are strung together into a single composition, bound by abstract ligatures. But it's an improvement of the formula. On Eye Contact, Gang Gang better balance song craft than atmosphere. The band's previous record, Saint Dymphna, had admirable futurist-pop ambitions-- collaging elements of hyphy, grime, techno, and contemporary R&B into a psychedelic stew-- but it sometimes came off overcooked. The instrumentals were often bursting with soupy sonic details, while Gang Gang's passes at honest-to-goodness pop-- other than Kate Bush-homage "House Jam"-- were at times stiff and over-considered....full text |
| Guardian |
| For their fifth album, New York's Gang Gang Dance have plunged deeper into the cosmic pop swamp they created on 2008's excellent Saint Dymphna. Opening with the 11-minute-long Glass Jar, which builds from fragmentary synth washes into something resembling a modern-day dance anthem, and ending with the harsh beats of the urgent Thru and Thru, it's an album that can overwhelm on first listen. It doesn't help matters that Liz Bougatsos's voice is such an odd instrument, piercing through the clattering drums and eastern rhythms of Adult Goth like a laser. Relative normality is found on the slinky duet with Alexis Taylor, Romance Layers, which offers up a kind of synth-heavy rereading of late-90s neo-soul, and there's a brilliant pop song lurking amongst the rubbery synth riffs, cut-up vocal samples and off-kilter melodies of the ridiculous MindKilla. They only tip over into unnecessary wilfulness with the three instrumentals tracks that break up the album's flow. Complex and jagged, Eye Contact unveils its charms slowly, but once it does, you'll want to immerse yourself completely....full text |
| Spin |
| As a proudly underground entity, Manhattan's Gang Gang Dance seemed bent on creating one long celestial psych jam. But for 2008's Saint Dymphna, they pared down the dubby dance experimentation and reaped the rewards (namely, a record deal). Less woozy and intoxicating than its predecessors, that album was a gateway drug into what now turns out to be an even wilder and murkier milieu. GGD's fifth album and first for 4AD, Eye Contact opens with the 11-minute "Glass Jar," a freewheeling mass of synths, cymbals, and high moans that withholds the beat far beyond the halfway mark. The song also contains a key clue: a man's voice declaring with Sheen-like clarity (and/or inscrutability), "It's everything time." While Dymphna divvied up the band's influences over ten identifiable songs, here their entire spectrum of styles gets blasted constantly, each track bleeding into the next. Eastern scales, New Age haze, jungle drums, and druggy rave effects create a dense aural whirl that assumes solid form only briefly: Lizzi Bougatsos keening like a Bollywood star gone dancehall ("Chinese High"); the C+C Music Factory crescendo of "Mindkilla"; and the fantastic "Romance Layers," with Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor lounging on a bed of house-inflected '90s R&B....full text |
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