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Saint Dymphna

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Gang Gang Dance

 
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Saint Dymphna
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Avg: 4.0 (159 ratings)

Brooklyn's favorite new ageist space rock band does it again

  • We Say...

    Review by Michaelangelo Matos

    The impressively ambitious third album from Brooklyn trio Gang Gang Dance is named for the Irish patron saint of, among other things, the mentally ill, epileptics, runaways and happy families. That's an odd combination; then again, so is this album. It's a logical follow-up to 2005's God's Money in the sense that its varied parts are subservient to the seamless whole, but in this case they're also distinctive enough to warrant inspection on their own. The opening track, "Bebey," shifts beguilingly though a handful of moods, evoking everything from David Byrne and Brian Eno's adventures in pseudo-ethnography to early Warp Records bleep-and-bass tracks; it also sounds like something the band threw together for the hell of it while playing around with rehearsal jams. It's loosey-goosey like early-'90s Madchester, yet you picture pebbly black-and-white film stock, not baggy T-shirts and glow sticks.

    Similarly, "Vacuum" plants the swooning, violin-like guitars of My Bloody Valentine's "Touched" into an instrumental that's equal parts pounding space-rock and chintzy Space Invaders effects; all three elements sound perfectly harmonious. When they bring in London grime MC Tinchy Stryder to abet tinkly pianos, post-punk guitars, a booming live-kit beat and what sounds like two dozen tinny cell phones going off at once on "Princes," they create one of the most oddly naturalistic fusions of this year or any.

  • They Say...

    Review by Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

    Brooklyn's Gang Gang Dance is an excellent example of the vibrancy found in the loosely knit underground musical community in New York. Traditionally, the trio has relied heavily on electronics and sampling but has used them to very free-form ends. Influences from Brian Eno to Tetsuo Inoue, and Eastern-tinged world music could be heard in their sprawling textures and ambience-laden warp grooves. With Saint Dymphna (titled for the patron saint of outsiders), GGD has a made another left turn but this time by turning right, away form the hippie/patchouli saturated post-psychedelic tribal music and toward the more structured forms of electronic beat music like dubstep and grime. Gone are the long, sprawling ragged jams of their previous albums; they are replaced with 11 "songs," none of them more than five-and-a-half minutes. The beauty in this is immediately apparent: the listener encounters the influence of latter day digital dubbers like Mad Scientist andDub Syndicate in the sprawling sonics on the album opener "Bebey," but that quickly morphs itself into a more rugged, robotic formalism with traces of Kraftwerk, Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft, and even Der Plan. This opens the fader gates for the floppy electro-funk of "First Communion," the first track to feature Liz Bougatsos' vocals. Sharded streams of electric guitar wrap themselves around her voice, also adorned by a deep rumbling bass that's fuzzed to the max, and then the winding, melodic, pulsing, electronic synths and a drum kit. It's the beginning of an exotic journey into sound that gets to the aforementioned dancefloor styles in earnest, such as the slower, four to the floor loops on "Blue Nile," and the truly exotic mélange of samples, sprawling void atmospherics. and stretched beats on "Vacuum." MC Tinchy Stryder is a featured vocalist on "Princes," where grime and dubstep come together in a rhythm collision of startling proportions. There is room for the truly abstract here as well, such as on the ambient soundtrack-like "Inners Pace," and the more elastic rhythmic construction on "Afoot." But by the time the listener gets to "House Jam" -- which is nothing less than an utterly psychedelic blend of acid house and trance with a "straight" sung vocal by Bougatsos -- she'll wonder if she's really hearing GGD at all. "Desert Storm" winds all of these explorations in a tightly constructed mélange of dubstep, electro, breakbeat science, and freaky trip-hop. GGD claim that this record was influenced by the bombast of reggaeton blasting on N.Y. streets. Maybe so, but the brew they've conjured is their own. It's easily their most fully realized project to date and rather than simply a pastiche, they've managed to create something that's completely their own.

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