May 4, 2011

Album Review: Gang Gang Dance - 'Eye Contact'

Brooklyn’s polyrhythmic five-piece get positive

8 / 10 Finance is in meltdown, the earth keeps burping, technology is getting scarily sentient, paupers scrape for pennies on the porches of the mega-rich – it’s not surprising that music is taking a turn to the apocalyptic. Gang Gang Dance, though, are waving a lone placard that reads ‘THE END IS NOT NIGH’.

‘Eye Contact’ is a piercing glimpse into an imagined Utopia of infinite possibility, as if they’ve focused their years of digital psychedelic jamming into a single beam, and fired it beyond a horizon peered at in vain by their peers. “I can hear everything” announces the voice on opening track ‘Glass Jar’, “it’s everything time…” He’s right, this is visually evocative, visionary stuff. The contented patter of ‘Chinese High’ is as if piped through a glorious chrome mall where everything is free.

‘Adult Goth’ is the opening fanfare to some weird clappy festival where nations embrace, like the 2222 Olympics without the crappy sports element. It’s the music Brian Eno would be making if he hadn’t become overly aware of the significance of his own shiny dome in musical history rather than the celestial wonder it once transmitted.

Gang Gang Dance build on ‘Princes’, their collaboration with Tinchy Stryder from last album ‘Saint Dymphna’, with ‘MindKilla’, which has the kind of synths that futurist egalitarian hip-hop artists will one day be sampling in viral trillion-play smashes. The cosmic euphoria of final track ‘Thru And Thru’ is motivational music for a contented workforce, who pack boxes for great reward and complimentary healthcare. It finishes with a robotic voice intoning “live forever”. Sometimes it’s fine to be servile, and obey.

Luke Turner

8/10

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