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Avg: 4.0 (54 ratings)
- Date Released: April 5, 2005
- Genre: Alternative/Punk
- Style: Indie Rock
- Label: The Social Registry / SC Distribution
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We Say...
Warning: this record is not for everyone. It is at times difficult and meandering, its grasp on melody irregular and unusual. Several tracks consist of little but polyrhythmic percussion and psychedelic feedback. Singer Liz Bougatsos' voice is often both sharp and too meek. It's not music for an iPod Shuffle: taken out of their album context, many of these songs sound half-finished. It could be classified as a new age record. And, perhaps most offensively, the band members are hippies. Yet despite all of this, it is, without question, one of my absolute favorite records of the past few years.
God's Money is an extended exercise in patience. The album's obvious standout — "Before My Voice Fails" — is also its core: the songs preceding and following it are context for that peak, the table-setters that magnify its delirious melody and swerving movements. Live, the band performs this album in its entirety without a break. And it's on stage that the true nature of the record becomes clear: there are no melodies, rhythms or even songs, at least not in a traditional sense but to split it apart is to mistake the proton for the atom — there are no bees, only the hive.
The album begins with colliding sound cultures: tribal drum patterns in the first track, Arabic and freak-folk dancing the Seven Veils in the second. And then, like a mirage, there's the impossibly lovely "Egowar," a composition constructed around a descending wind chime and the staccato chirps of a pan flute. (When I saw them live a few months ago, a light show kicked in at this moment. I suddenly felt like I was in the middle of a kick-ass Robert Phoenix column.) After several false crescendos (droning loops building and building only to mutate into pan flutes without warning), "Egowar" segues into "Untitled (Piano)," itself an ambient segue, and then "God's Money V," a meaty, beat-driven segue, and then, finally, "Before My Voice Fails."
"Before My Voice Fails" is very Kate Bush (or, for you younger folk, Bjork). The melodic pattern feels counterintuitive — her voice hits sevenths when we expect major chords, the melody goes orange when we expect left — but then, four minutes in, everything coalesces and explodes, the only true release of the album. The band seems drained after the moment, winding down slowly and carefully, the closing "God's Money IX" something akin to an ambient industrial love song.
Gang Gang Dance aren't only worthy of a cult following: they deserve a bona fide occult. Although I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what this album says or means, greater truths lurk just beneath the surface, even if it's only how to get from point a to chi or where in Brooklyn to get the best hummus. But when it's delivered like this, the message hardly matters. -
They Say...
Thankfully, the Internet has boundless space, all the better to cope with the twaddle bouncing around the Web about Gang Gang Dance and their latest album. Perhaps people are somewhat baffled that the band is as much a live unit as a studio concern, thus throwing off musical perceptions. Freak-folk, art-noise, tribal dub, you name a whacked-out hybrid description, and it's been applied by someone to this group. Take 'em off-stage, though, and what you really have is an ambient electronic unit that's no more or less experimental than anything coming out on, say, the DiN label. "God's Money I" and "God's Money V," for instance, are both built around tribal drum rhythms, the former with wailing vocals on top, the latter in a more experimental, almost Tetsu Inoue mode. "God's Money IX," in contrast, rolls with thunder and is a much darker piece, while "God's Money VII" is filled with ambient textures. "Before My Voice Fails" reaches ethereal proportions, while both "Untitled (Piano)" and "Egowar" feature gorgeous synth passages. Even the noisy, fractured "Glory in Itself/Egyptian" has a melody lurking within. The most challenging number, however, is "Nomad for Love (Cannibal)," where shards of musical bits and pieces are only loosely woven together. The Gang's rhythms and textures are intriguing, and much more accomplished in sound than their previous lo-fi efforts. What throws the group for a loop however, are Liz Bougatsos' vocals: chanted, singsong babbled, howled, and wailed in turn. Her presence almost solely pulls the Gang out of the ambient world and into another far more disturbing and experimental galaxy entirely. Without her, God's Money would be a haunting journey through an ever-shifting electronic world, where textures and rhythms are explored to oftentimes great effect. With her, the musical experience is far more difficult, as she cuts across the grain of the atmospheres and moods, suggesting the group will never sit comfortably in any niche but its own.
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| 01. |  |
God's Money I (Percussion) |
1:58 |
|
| 02. | |
A) Glory in Itself B) Egyptian |
5:27 |
|
| 03. | |
Egowar |
8:49 |
|
| 04. | |
Untitled (Piano) |
3:19 |
|
| 05. | |
God's Money V |
3:38 |
|
| 06. | |
Before My Voice Fails |
5:20 |
|
| 07. | |
God's Money VII |
3:15 |
|
| 08. | |
Nomad For Love |
4:49 |
|
| 09. | |
God's Money IX |
2:19 |
|
09 Total Tracks, 38:54 Total Length
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Credits
- Sean Maffucci - Engineer
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