August 5th, 2009
Review: Gang Gang Dance
Noise music. It’s an acquired taste. Sometimes, it seems, it takes the most esoteric and cerebral of folks to enjoy it—those who can disassociate all their senses of what makes a song a good song because they’re artists themselves, they relish in chaos or seek something totally weird. Tuesday night at Kung Fu Necktie was a presentation of the whole range; from weirdo noise to totally crowd-pleasing groove-heavy dance jams, an audience was exposed to a night of arty music. It was a stinky, sweaty, hot August night avant-guard music and the payoff was worth it.
Because modern music is a mind-fuck of sounds; a huge range and a post-modern world provides musicians innumerable ways of creating sounds from other sounds (samples, loops, laptops, synths, beats, etc.). But your creativity with these sounds would be what sets you apart from the two year old banging on baby’s first Casio, right? Gang Gang Dance takes it all and molds it into one of the most body-moving, percussion-heavy multi-genre aural clusterbang in recent memory. Animal Collective comes to mind—a band who brings grooves out of chaos and employs chanting, carnality and indigenous sounds with samples and synths.
With GGD there is a heavy emphasis on percussion and rhythms but not necessarily from a machine. The lead singer, Liz Bougatsos, put her mallot-style drumsticks down only for a few songs. She sang in front of a collection of bongos, a bass drum, cymbal and high-hat and filled in near-silences with drum and cymbal rolls. Brian Degraw, accepting keys, percussion and synth responsibilities, also held drumsticks in his hand most of the night and achieved some of the band’s worldbeat reputation by playing a drum pad like steel drums. Guitarist Josh Diamond tweaked a stack full of black boxes which seemed responsible for the trumpet sounds on one song. But of course the stellar drumming of the full-on drummer drummer, Tim DeWitt, is what pulls the performance together. He is a mad man and his drums filled that little room like they needed to.
There’s a moment in nearly every GGD song when seemingly disparate elements were brought together by a crash of drums or the introduction of a new rhythm. Each song picked up momentum and by the end, the crowded room was moving and swaying like a hippified festival set. They took it there. Eight to ten minute songs dominated by a tribal-flavored beats were reminiscent of house and trance, and yet, strangely, also of jam bands like moe.. (Bill Chenevert)
