Even allowing for pejorative undertones, ‘hipster’ once, in its 1940/50s sense, referred to a progressive subculture of connoisseurs, aesthetes and aficionados. As problematic as its fixation with the ‘otherness’ of black culture might have been, this was the avant-garde. Today’s so-called hipster is, in contrast, derided as a detached dilettantish figure, while the musical products associated with the (non-) culture are often retro-fixated, amounting to little more than accurate pastiche at best. Where engagement with the present is more palpable, it frequently comes with a sly wink-and-a-nod or as a clumsy mishmash.
The internet makes it easy for this modern hipsterism to proliferate; so many of us are dipping into disparate musical disciplines with an ever-decreasing sense of temporal or geographical context. There are more ‘others’ than ever to enthuse about and they’re all only a click away. In this milieu the spoken opening of Gang Gang Dance’s ‘Glass Jar’: “I can hear everything. It’s everything time” could serve as an apt intro for a record by any number of contemporary acts. You might expect an onslaught of mismatched references or pallid mimicry to follow, but Gang Gang Dance have a genuinely hipper approach to the everything, moulding the overload into forms that fit their own vision.
It’s all about integration: ‘Glass Jar’ doesn’t rush in blindly, it revels in the ecstasy of the all-consuming, allowing its constituent parts to reveal themselves slowly. The track will eventually take in synthesised steel drums, proggy breakdowns, African pop-inflected guitars and breakneck jungle-tempo drumming, but it begins with an undulating blissed out preface of pitchbent synths, soft cymbal work and whispers: “it’s been a dream time”, “colourful time” “niiiice”. It’s here at the start that Gang Gang Dance’s origins as an experimental improvisational unit come into sharp focus: elements don’t collide, they grow naturally from the jam. And what Eye Contact represents as whole, even more than its pretty poppy predecessor Saint Dymphna, is the growth of the band’s art space experiments into something more fully formed, though it remains a restless, amorphous form.
For all this fluidity there’s still a boldness to the Gang Gang Dance project, after all this is a band who featured a pre-household name Tinchy Stryder spitting about East London life over a ramshackle art-rock interpretation of grime. Building on that, we now get thrusting dancehall beats on ‘Chinese High’ and soca/UK funky rhythms on ‘Mindkilla’, all delivered with greater cohesion than ever before, thanks to new drummer Jesse Lee. The pronounced but dextrous engagement with present urban dance and pop forms is key, reflecting the genre blending and bending of the post-punk era. Where the interest in that period has frequently manifested itself in imitation, GGD take up the gauntlet not as copyists but true heirs to their progressive downtown forbears: punk-funksters Liquid Liquid or perhaps more fittingly now, dance-pop fusioneers Tom Tom Club (their name even has that same percussive intonation).
Where things are more obviously indebted to the past, as on ‘Romance Layers’, which pays homage to 80s drum machine-led R&B, the overall effect is still one of the source servicing the Gang Gang sound. The sparkly soul is subtly twisted and psychedelicised – irreverent it may be, but there’s no sneering, just the sound of Lizzi Bougatsos and guest vocalist Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor luxuriating, almost writhing, in its opulence. As with any of their influences – devotional Eastern music, funky, rave, noise, drum circles – GGD always extract the most transcendent and euphoric qualities from the resources, drawing parallels between them.
Eye Contact is the best yet from a band who are in so many ways the quintessential zeitgeist catchers, effortlessly amalgamating myriad modern genres into their own, tirelessly experimenting while edging ever closer to becoming a bona fide pop group. It’s also a signal that we should expect and perhaps demand more from our avant-garde, our pop, our hipsters.
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