“I can hear everything, it’s everything time.” With that pronouncement, the 5th full-length from astral dilettantes and sometime Brooklyn residents Gang Gang Dance slowly lifts from the launchpad with quiet grace into the 11-minute opener “Glass Jar.” It’s all lens flares and gentle percolations of field-recorded spoken-word snippets, synthesized glissandi, tinkling chimes, and teased cymbals as the atmosphere thins from blue to bruise black. Some four minutes in, the mothership slowly rotates on its axis and the more ardent arpeggios of a navigation computer begin to flash. With a distant stellar destination in sight, the track erupts with a joyous, driving hyperjump halfway along its length and we are propelled into the brilliant all-nite-flite realm of Gang Gang Dance at their best, wrapped about with Liz Bougastos’ ethereal cooing and stabs of charmingly cheep-preset-keys’ steel drums and Fripped-out guitar. It’s the Mos Eisley Cantina house band high on 21st-century spice and a brilliant introduction to a typically gorgeous, strange album whose twists and turns nevertheless form a tightly coordinated intergalactic journey.
Gang Gang Dance have always been keen on crafting album-length voyages for their listeners, but this full-length follow-up to the scintillating Saint Dymphna has an even tighter trajectory. Saint Dymphna was a glorious Aladdin’s cave of sonic gems, revisiting woozy My Bloody Valentine atmospheres displaced to dancefloors here, there famously collaborating with grime boss Tinchy Stryder before he hit high rotation, just for instance. Eye Contact has many of these elements, but couches them more comfortably and consistently, cruising from alpha to omega with just a few diversionary pit-stops, barely stopping to play stylistic hopscotch across the Kaoss pads of their formidably cosmic imaginations.
The album is built around three interludes marked by a number of lemniscates (infinity signs to you and me) reminding us that it’s everything-time because anything goes, but only for a while. The first, “∞,” is a reprieve from the breathless opener, a faded recording of a Latin crooner cocooned by electronic susurrations. This hushed episode paves the way for “Adult Goth,” a track that, when it breaks down, is reminiscent of the labyrinth-rave, Goblinesque postures of Gatekeeper: a haunted gothic castle of pulsing dance music burnished with winding arabesques and Bougastos’ mournful, horizonward voice. From: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/Gang-Gang-Dance-Eye-Contact
