Eye Contact

Eye Contact solidifies the group's heavyweight majesty. Gang Gang Dance injects pop music with new life, leading the quest for newer sounds from ageless sources and mixing it all together in a critically irresistible way.

Dive into their magnificent depths and you might find a record to fall in love with several times over.

Yeah, Gang Gang Dance's idea of accessible and pop-ready is just as trippy and emotionally affecting as ever. Now, you can play it in the car on a Friday night, too.

New York's experimental sonic collective continues to make challenging and rewarding music on Eye Contact.

Eye Contact-- the group's latest album-- is Gang Gang Dance's finest, weirdest, and most uplifting statement yet.

More critically, though, is that Eye Contact works very well as a stamp on this band's original turn with Saint Dymphna: now that we know that a lot of their contemporaries were also going to turn in this direction, it's nice to see a band that was once ahead of the curve still working so hard to keep their sound this fascinating.

It's a concise, tidy sounding album, with little of the noise leakage of old. [May 2011, p.51]

While no commercial crossover will be gained from Eye Contact, Gang Gang Dance have released one of the most captivating albums of the year, each song different yet cohesive, challenging and ultimately highly rewarding.

They've showed glimmers of brilliance before, but Eye Contact is easily Gang Gang Dance's crowning achievement.

This album is indeed a key turning point for the unit, and easily the most fully realized project in their catalog.

All-enveloping and omnivorous, it's hard to tell if this record wants to hug you or eat you, but it's blissful submitting to its embrace. [Jun 2011, p.93]

Eye Contact works because its bolshie drum patterns and metallic synth stabs, influenced by Jamaican dancehall and UK bass music, anchor it firmly in the near future, while Lizzie Bougastsos' strong and inventive melodies help make light work of what could come across like a pretentious muddle. [Jun 2011, p.85]

For anyone with ears tired of the sirens, the red herrings, surfing the more visible peaks of the endless ocean in search of something worth combing over, you'll find this spacebound lighthouse a good place to put your feet up; and get up on your feet, if so inclined. Thoroughly recommended.

Even though this is the band's most accessible album yet, casual listeners should still beware. Like most Gang Gang albums, it first comes off as overwrought jumble. But with repeat spins, it gradually morphs into its true nature of earworm irresistibility.

In all, this is a muscular yet not flashy outing from Gang Gang Dance, and its smooth confidence is a welcome respite from its self-indulgent neighbors.

It's challenging yet fairly catchy beneath all the layering. It's abstract vocally yet painfully direct musically. It's not for most yet potentially has crossover appeal at its heart.

This is some of the most welcoming music Gang Gang Dance have ever pieced together – less diffuse but still rewardingly complex, without any of the clutter that could occasionally overwhelm less patient parties.

Eye Contact is a piercing glimpse into an imagined Utopia of infinite possibility, as if they've focused their years of digital psychedelic jamming into a single beam, and fired it beyond a horizon peered at in vain by their peers.

Eye Contact delights with its danceability and synthetic pleasure, but it's frontwoman Lizzi Bougatsos who holds the jams together.

Gang Gang Dance are back to testing boundaries. For them, it's a return to the future.

Complex and jagged, Eye Contact unveils its charms slowly, but once it does, you'll want to immerse yourself completely.

The crucial difference is that new wave was the province of song bands; Gang Gang Dance isn't a jam band in the Grateful Dead mode, but stretching out is one of its top priorities, and the band writes its material by playing to tape and expanding the best parts.

Though Eye Contact represents another exhilarating turn from one of modern music's most enterprising groups, many people will likely be turned off by the sound of Bougatsos' helium shriek; that voice may be initially challenging to the ears, but those who arrive with the awareness that this isn't exactly the stuff of sing-along melodies, honeyed vocals, and verse/chorus/verse gratification will be pleased they stuck around.

The music's hard to classify, but one word might sum it up: ecstatic.