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Gang Gang Dance

When I first heard the name, I thought this was going to be some sort of underground electro outfit and although they didn't have the beats I was expecting, I still wasn't completely off. Helming from NYC, Gang Gang Dance used the same noisy weirdness of the No Neck Blues Band (singer Lizzi Bougatsos was a member of NNCK side-side-project Angelblood) but with a decidedly more pop aesthetic. It makes for very strange yet alluring music. If you're like me, you might be a bit put off at first, their earlier records are quite noisy and the pop element much more difficult to pinpoint (Lizzi's voice can sometimes sound like a bastardized version of french pop star Mylène Farmer), but with time the group's recordings reveal their charm and you'll want to go back to them again and again in hope of finding something new with every listen.

When Wire Magazine published the famous issue that tried to define and categorize the whole weirdo-art-scene in the US and called it "New Weird America", the bands it covered were Sunburned Hand Of The Man, The Tower Recordings, Charalambides and of course, the aforementioned NNCK. The tag was far-reaching and engulfed many other bands with completely different sounds and even older bands who were there long before the "genre" ever existed and of course, Gang Gang Dance became a part of the bunch. But when you listened closely, you could hear many of these groups' roots and influences (MV+EE/Fahey; NNCK/German Oak for example), but Gang Gang Dance are not so easy to track down, they didn't sound like anybody! Whenever you think you can hear an influence in their music, it disappears almost immediately, morphs into something completely different and you forget you've even heard it in the first place and move on. Now that is New Weird America.

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