Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna (Album)
Channeling multiple eras of electronic music and currents of international mysticism and weaving them into their evolving tapestry of transcendent percussion and ethereal pop inclinations, Gang Gang Dance created Saint Dymphna.
For the Gang Gang Dance novice, the crew specializes in complex rhythms and dense layers of equal parts noise and melody, with tribal and worldbeat influences in both the percussion and the vocal chants.
Named after the patron saint of outsiders, Saint Dymphma is packed with more dance and electronic outfits than previous. Yet this album has a much more refined focus steering you in the direction that Gang Gang Dance wants to take you.
With most its tracks segueing together into one passage, Saint Dymphna is a journey of rushing peaks and valleys. Lizzi Bougatsos's vocals - somewhere between Bjork and Yoshimi Pi We - will not be to everybody's taste, her spontaneous yelps and howls riding the vagaries of the music as if driven by tribal fervours.
Princes, with its garage beats and unlikely guest MC spot from UK Grime rapper Tinchy Stryder, seems a bit too zeitgeist grabbing, but it works better than it should, a full-on sonic mash-up of cavernous dub bass, insane synths and Stryder's abrasive East London raps.
The flight-of-stairs-falling-down-a-flight-of-stairs electro of Inners Pace is like a carnival in a Tokyo amusement arcade, while Afoot finds the singer making what sounds like some kind of political diatribe over massive landslides of dubbed out effects, cascading walls of echo chamber.
Brought to the UK, Europe & Australia by Warp, the album holds a wildly inclusive musical vision that collects everything from slippery, polyrhythmic sing-a-longs such as 'House Jam', to discombobulated prog-rock and Gamelan-esque Grime.
The back cover of Gang Gang Dance's fourth album depicts a man in a white robe and obscuring headscarf, carrying - no, not a backpack filled with explosives, but an amp for an electric guitar. It's a cheeky, provocative image that neatly expresses the Brooklyn quartet's desire to subvert cliche and forge unexpected connections between people and sounds.
What that means musically is an album poised between dance and rock, New York abstract electronica and African tribal rhythms, 1980s post-punk-ambient-experimentalism and 21st-century futurism. A mish-mash, then, but one arranged with exquisite precision.
