Gang Gang Dance LP

lex I think the el guincho record is really good, but if you didn't like person pitch it's probably not for you

I think it depends on why you don't like Person Pitch frankly.

i didn't like person pitch because...well, for one there are those awful wimpy vocals, so hand-wringing and timorous. beach boys harmonies leave me cold at the best of times but these are even more of a drag, so slow and irresolute, refusing to resolve into anything attractive. also i'm sure like the entire album is out of tune? or at least disorientating in a really unpleasant way, like you're hearing it underwater. i don't care if this was the intent, it sounds shitty. the music just sounds like muddied-up found sounds, not even arranged well, it's a total mess. and there's nothing else, it's all detail and no groove, cake decorations (the kind that taste really horribly sweet if you try to eat them) without any cake. it actually made me feel nauseous to listen to and is seriously one of the worst things i've ever heard, my dislike isn't just reaction against the baffling praise for it.

which is why i'm confused that it's being brought up here... st dymphna is so bold and clean and precise, everything which person pitch wasn't.

I suspect you might like El Guincho. In a lot of ways it's Person Pitch minus the Beach Boys plus groove.

especially since both st dymphna and el guincho are both very percussive

Hmmm, I guess I need to listen to El Guincho again.

ok well a friend told me to give el guincho a chance a couple of weeks ago so i guess once i make copy deadline tonight (hollow laugh) i'll dig out the promo

listening to st dymphna now, is it that feeling of randomness which makes people compare it to person pitch? both have a load of ingredients but st dymphna uses its random/unexpected quality in completely different ways, every new sound is an extra spark which builds on what was already there to good effect, as opposed to just something else to throw haphazardly into the mix

Honestly I haven't spent much time with this new one yet so I won't comment on it, but everyone who hasn't heard "God's Money" should go listen to it.

i've enjoyed Saint Dymphna over the last couple of days. They way they akwardly stack sounds is super appealing, however 'crass' some of them are (this in terms of pitch wheel keyboards and weird casio bass). Im not all too keen on the girls bizzaro-accent yells, but that is countered beautifully by tinchy stryder using a robo filter.
My only other prev. contact with them came in the form of that Retina Riddim DVD/disc, which i thought was great. The audio disc with that, btw, runs to the exact playing time as Music For 18 Musicians. Im yet to figure the significance of that tho.

"is it that feeling of randomness which makes people compare it to person pitch? both have a load of ingredients but st dymphna uses its random/unexpected quality in completely different ways, every new sound is an extra spark which builds on what was already there to good effect, as opposed to just something else to throw haphazardly into the mix"

Well obv I don't hear Person Pitch that way at all, that album feels obsessively structured to me (any shifts in sound are quite deliberate and really there's not many of them, where the track changes directly completely it's more in the sense of it effectively becoming an entirely new song), whereas Saint Dymphna has this sort of frenzied chaos that could end disastrously but doesn't, not because there's a secret structure but because by glorious happenstance none of their moves fuck up. They're like an insane gambler who really should lose a round just to learn a lesson, but for some reason always wins.

The comparisons spring not from any strict similarity but because kaleidoscopic, dance-not-dance hippie-dippie sample-pop seems to have turned into a miniature movement within indie over the last twelve months after having been out in the cold for about seven years (the elephant in the room is The Avalanches); for better or worse, Person Pitch is the flashpoint for this development.

Lex I'd say the likelihood of you liking El Guincho (who I really really like, though not as much as Saint Dymphna) could depend on what you think of Manu Chao.

"itll be awesome when theres a band w/gang gang dance/excepter style sensibilities that has more conventional awesome songs and singing - this is by no means a criticism of said bands - btw are there any bands like that"

This is basically what I'm always looking for. I do like that there are several bands (Gang Gang Dance, Animal Collective, Air France) that are closing in on this space from different directions. But I don't know of anything right in that interzone just now.

― Tim F, Wednesday, October 29, 2008 8:38 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ el guincho

― jaxon, Thursday, October 30, 2008 2:38 AM (14 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I disagee because it seems that songwriting and singing are the two things that el guincho is weakest at. I haven't heard the record much, but I def wouldn't consider it having more conventional awesome songs and singing than the others listed here.

Agreeing with the opinion of El Guincho's weak singing up in here. Oh my god, that dude's half assed yell is so detrimental to my enjoyment. His vocals follow the same kind of pattern (you know the one) that feature so heavily on AC's 'Feels', but just sound so fucking LAZY.

tim, i really wouldn't place gang gang dance in that mini-movement at all - they seem much more to be in the NYC punk-funk tradition, the comparisons springing to mind are out hud, !!! and liars (and ESG too? i don't know a huge deal about them but for some reason i've conflated ESG and GGD for ages). really can't see how they could be classed more with animal collective and their ilk - the scope of their music is so different, macro not micro.

i can def see the avalanches/panda bear connection, if only cuz i have a v similar visceral negative reaction to both, but surely that places GGD at even more of a remove from this continuum?

Yes there's obv a punk-funk resemblance. And Gang Gang Dance are taking ideas from grime, reggaeton etc. whereas I think Animal Collective/Panda Bear are now vibing off techno primarily. But Animal Collective circa 2007/2008 are very different to Animal Collective circa 2003, 2004 or 2006. The live show I saw last year in particular sounded a lot like Gang Gang Dance in places.

If you're thinking of Animal Collective in generalist terms (i.e. "their ilk" - Rings, Ariel Pink etc.) then the comparison wouldn't make sense.

By way of comparison, it's a bit like saying "No way is Bjork glitch techno, have you actually listened to "Army of Me"?" - the question is basically: "which version of this artist are we talking about?"

GGD don't really sound like ESG, who are totally minimal (though not "minimal").

x-post Lex you're in danger of implying that liking something and disliking something else is clear evidence that they're stylistically dissimilar. When often we can have wildly divergent attitudes towards quite similar music. It's okay to say "Gang Gang Dance are a bit like Panda Bear and The Avalanches in places but I like them." Also the only Avalanches song you like is the worst song on their album so I don't trust you on them.

I mean, I can totally see why you would like Gang Gang Dance and not Panda Bear or Animal Collective, but that's more about the constellation of your tastes rather than the constellation of these stylistic approaches in some objective sense.

i meant that GGD are even less like the avalanches than they are like panda bear, and that i can see the avalanches/panda connection cuz i dislike them in much the same way.

i don't hear any techno ideas in panda bear? like, at all?

Ha if "I'm Not" was on a Total comp no-one would bat an eyelid. But the AC live show I went to was much more electronic - Tobias in another thread compared the show to Underworld. I wouldn't go quite that far myself but I can see what he's getting at. The new AC album due in a couple of months is supposed to run entirely with that sound, although you can already hear it on several stretches of Strawberry Jam.

(again, I suspect you're operating on a slightly - and quite legitimately - outmoded notion of what Panda Bear/AC's aesthetic is. It would be like if I assumed all Digital Mystikz was crappy slow-slow-slow dirge-step because I'd only heard Loefah and Coki tracks. Which would be a reasonable assumption but not actually correct)

Re The Avalanches, I think stuff like "Dust", "House Jam" (if you ignore the vocals), "Interlude" and "Blue Nile" are very much in the vein of Since I Left You - loose, dancey grooves, lots of overlaid trebly samples and sounds, a general stardusted feel...

Again, the comparisons here aren't meant to be "oh my god they are the same thing" and more about sketching out a loose phenotype of PLUR sample-pop inclinations in what we might call "indie" in an expansive sense (i.e. stuff that's not totally dance, not totally hip hop, not totally chart-pop) - I'm throwing Air France in there as well who I think you really would like Lex (if you don't already).

To put it in reverse terms, would we be astonished to hear stuff like The Avalanches' "Electricity" or "Extra Kings" or "This Flight Tonight" on Saint Dymphna? I don't think so.

it's been at least three years since i listened to any animal collective so you may well be right! and i only ever listened to the avalanches album twice, when it came out, and don't recall any of the track names, sorry - i just think the difference is that GGD's production is cleaner, you can hear everything going on, whereas my visceral problem with the avalanches and panda bear is how messy and cluttered the music is, it ends up as discordant mush. which is why i can't hear it as techno at all, it's not pristine enough.

Lizzi's wish for Gang Gang to score a douche commercial will be realized, mark my words.

lol

tampon commercial i thought, not douche commercial
do they even make douche commercials anymore?

garret morris to thread

http://www.discogs.com/image/A-193237-1129499104.gif

Tinchy Stryder?

For some reasons parts of this album also make me think of the first Isolee album. And not just because both have tracks that reference Loveless.

not sure what the question is but yeah tinchy stryder is on the track Princes

And that picture is of Tinchy Stryder as well.

oh I get it. for some reason that image doesn't show up for me

gotta say, i think the gang gang dance have a lot of this in their sound...

http://srsly.tv/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/dcd84.jpg

i mentioned that in another thread, too.

also, telepathe sound so much like gang gang dance on their first ep it's scary. i'd be willing to bet ggd came along first, though

"First Communion"-which sounds like a tribal version of Justice jamming with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah practice space

wtf?

Right now, I could listen to "Vacuum" forever.

it was cool to see that song live cause i didnt't realize the main riff was guitar.

'Blue Nile' sounds quiet Prefusey

hey look there's an LA version of GGD
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/download/147194-pitchforktv-rainbow-arabia-let-them-dance-video-premiere

Tinchy doesn't really work for me or feels un-necessary on 'Princes' but the music is awesome

"First Communion"-which sounds like a tribal version of Justice jamming with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah practice space

haha where is this nonsense quote from?!

i think tinchy sounds immense on 'princes' (it's a slightly reworked version of his 'mainstream money' verses which people should check) (haha slight mystery: i interviewed him about a month, maybe more, ago, and asked him about working w/gang gang dance (before i'd heard the track)), and he said that there had been plans to work with them but nothing had come of it in the end. i assumed the rumours i'd heard were false - so i was obv v confused when i finally heard 'princes'. so i'm not sure whether he misheard my question and thought i was talking about someone else, or whether gang gang dance just used vocals he'd already laid down...)

haha where is this nonsense quote from?!
http://www.straight.com/article-168984/gang-gang-dance-credits-right-its-rise

another band doing the dubby, worldy, noisy thing is SF's Mi Ami
http://www.myspace.com/miamiamiami

a lil less on the sampledelic side of things, though.

Wow this is amazing. So much going on! I'm on the penultimate track and already want to go right back to the start to listen back to spot more things. The Tinchy track works I think, because his flow is in someways better suited to being part of the murk than right upfront, and on Princes it sounds like another sample being woven in and out.

Wait to to you hear the last track though!

I'm loving this.

Hecuba is the L.A. gang gnag

If anything is going to beat Portishead for me this year... it could be this record. I've played it at least a dozen times this week, and it hasn't gotten the least bit old.

"The audio disc with that, btw, runs to the exact playing time as Music For 18 Musicians. "

Doubly weird, then, that the start of their song "Nicoman" is exactly like the start of that very Reich piece.

wow this album is great! loving the uh kaleidoscopic-ness and the 'computer incarnations for world peace' vibe

anyone hear that brian degraw solo lp?

http://printedmatter.org/cover_images/82969.418.jpg

i have been a huge fan of these guys for years so i duno if most people just picking up 'saint dymphma' would be into it, but it still is a great, weird record. almost reminiscent of one of yamataka eye's side projects (lift boys, etc)

show tonight was sooo much better than cmj

although I can admit the possibility that the other show might have gotten that good if I stayed past 3am. the super housey encore was the best bit