GANG GANG DANCE || Eye Contact

Gang Gang Dance
Eye Contact
Label: 4AD Records
Released on: May 10th, 2011
Grade: 2.5 out of 5 meatballs
Reviewed by: Patrick Johnson

Gang Gang Dance has always had something rare and enviable amongst modern indie bands: a unique sound. There's no mistaking a GGD track for anyone else. While the singular vocal stylings of Lizzi Bougatsos undeniably contribute to that, the sounds used by the band and how they layer them together is just as distinctive, making their instrumental tracks stand out as much as their vocal ones.

Much of their music floats along on a sort of dream logic combination of pop, tribal gatherings, avant-garde jamming, electronic dance music rhythms, and slightly New Age-inspired atmospherics. Following something of a similar path to fellow NYC-based sonic adventurers Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance started out making alienating psychedelic noise and over the years have incorporated more pop influences, culminating in a perfect balance between avant-garde exploration and catchy song writing with 2008's Saint Dymphna. Now we have their full-length follow-up to that album, Eye Contact, which finds the band smoothing out their sound even more as they stray further into the realm of pop music.

Of course, GGD's take on pop is still pretty left-of-center compared to that of most bands. Lead single and album opener "Glass Jar" is over 11 minutes of drifting, spaced-out atmospherics. For about half of its running time, the track is carried along on a stream of sound that isn't too far removed from the introspective ambient techno that became briefly popular in the mid-90s thanks to records like Global Communication's 76:14. Eventually, though, the track picks up momentum and turns into one of the group's most blissful jams yet. "Glass Jar" manages to maintain the equilibrium between cosmic meandering and focused rhythms that have marked their best material. Unfortunately, the rest of the album doesn't pull off the same feat.

Gang Gang Dance has always toed the line between forward-looking experimentation and questionable hippie mysticism, but their risks have usually paid off in some truly transcendent soundscapes that made the band sound like they inhabited a world all their own. On Eye Contact, though, they drink copiously from the well of New Age cheese and soft rock blandness. While tracks like "Adult Goth" and "MindKilla" aren't particularly egregious in their copping of flower child inanity, they still come off as second-rate retreads of ideas the band has explored before, ultimately feeling aimless and overly long. The soft synths of "Chinese High," on the other hand, conjure up images of wholesale yoga sweats and therapeutic DVDs of soothing waterfalls. Even more unexpected is the 90s R&B slow jam groove of the appropriately titled "Romance Layers." None of these songs are straightforward enough to quite be mistaken for adult contemporary radio or anything, but the tone is so overwhelmingly banal that it's difficult to generate much excitement over them. Fortunately, the album ends on a high note with "Thru And Thru," whose exotic, sinister synth line and rhythmic intensity provides the bite the majority of the album lacks.

Overall, Eye Contact marks a disappointing turn in Gang Gang Dance's career, losing a good portion of what made them so special for much of the 00s. There's enough promise in "Glass Jar" and "Thru And Thru" to suggest that their glory days aren't completely behind them, but so much of what comes in between those two tracks hints that the band has moved out of their own unique musical dimension and into a more commonplace one. It's always a drag to see the extraordinary become merely ordinary.