"I can hear everything. It's everything time," intones a male voice at the very start of Gang Gang Dance's fifth album, like a theatre host just before the curtains part. It's about as succinct an introduction to the New York collective as you're likely to hear, and it's one that they seem more determined to live up to than ever.
"Fusion" may still be a word with dubious connotations, conjuring up visions of endlessly jamming hippies whose natural habitat is a farflung stage at Glastonbury. Retagged as "eclectic" or "experimental", though, it's an aesthetic that has quietly gained currency over the past decade, particularly within the indie world.
Among the artists for whom blending disparate influences into an "avant garde" whole has paid off critically are perennial indie favourites such as Animal Collective (psychedelia, techno, execrable singing), Micachu (grime, tweelectronica, homemade instruments) and, of course, M.I.A., whose entire raison d'être rests on her ability to skim global street music to pick out the shiny bits. Current flavour of the month Tune-Yards, too, has gained plaudits for her integration of everything from African percussion to reggae into her clattering, off-kilter pop.
Practically, it is easy to see why this is on the rise, with the internet enabling exposure and access to music outside of an artist's comfort zone - both geographically and figuratively - like never before. But the strategy itself is one that resonates with its audience for what it signifies, not just what it sounds like: it speaks to a curiosity about the world.
Of course, indie has long thrived on the idea of escaping the mundane: in many cases, it seems to be as much about attempting to disown one's own privilege by utilising the perceived authenticity of the Other. Consequently, it is often problematic - and issues of thoughtless appropriation are only enhanced by technologically enabled collages, whether merely aesthetic (the cringeworthy sound of Vampire Weekend using Afrobeat to decorate their tales of Ivy League hipsterdom) or practical (Diplo lifting a beat by Brazilian funk carioca producer DJ Marlboro wholesale for M.I.A.'s Bucky Done Gun in 2005 - and not bothering to credit its originator).
Gang Gang Dance have often been classed in this wave, with their music regularly integrating everything from Arabic chanting to featured grime MCs - though they have been at it since before it became fashionable. Their little-heard debut album emerged in 2004. But it is clear they fit into a different, and more valuable, lineage of the alternative avant garde: one that recognises that experimenting with other people's traditions is a minefield, but also that true boldness of vision comes from picking one's way carefully through it rather than charging in and chucking everything into the mixer. It's territory that figures such as Björk and Tom Waits have tilled successfully; and if Gang Gang Dance bear only slight stylistic resemblances to those artists, they share something of the same spirit - and, crucially, the ability to make their magpie experiments sound not like a simultaneous multitude of genres, but their own, utterly sui generis genre.
Having started out life on the wilder shores of experimental noise and improv, the trajectory of Gang Gang Dance's career has brought them ever closer to accessible pop and dancefloor. Their fourth full length, 2008's monumental Saint Dymphna, proved something of a breakthrough -and for good reason. Where the band's previous albums had been worthwhile works full of interesting ideas that seemed to indicate untapped potential rather than fully formed greatness in their own right, Saint Dymphna was an unstoppable force of an album: unadulterated power on a towering scale, executed with an addictive confidence. It made every other rock album released that year sound puny. Perfectly sequenced, it even contained three bona fide pop songs as its peaks: the furious, electroconvulsive riffs and hooks of First Communion, British grime MC Tinchy Stryder's showstopping turn on Princes, the Timbaland-referencing rave House Jam.
Eye Contact takes the bar raised by Saint Dymphna as both starting point and challenge - and if it doesn't quite surpass it, it certainly matches it. Indeed, the band seem to be aiming for an even grander scale than previously: opening with an 11-minute epic that takes six minutes to fully kick in and titling even the interludes with various iterations of the infinity symbol would indicate this. Eye Contact is a denser, more layered album than Saint Dymphna: where the latter's specific influences often stuck out clearly, the band's ideas here seem more self-contained rather than external reference points. The architecture of their tracks is as engrossingly detailed and surprising as ever, but the nooks and crannies and unexplored passages around every corner feel less like patchwork elements of another style: the rhythmic switch-ups that punctuate the unexpected light touch of Chinese High, say, or the way Adult Goth slides from chiming stateliness into a wormhole of bass are thrilling - not because they necessarily bring specific influences to mind, but on a far more visceral level. Even when Gang Gang Dance overtly bring the outside world into their bubble - singer Lizzi Bougatsos interpolating the traditional lullaby Hush, Little Baby to superb effect on MindKilla, Hot Chip singer Alexis Taylor's guest spot on Romance Layers, what sounds like a sample of a traditional Italian song on the first interlude - they are sublimated thoroughly into the overall streamlined chaos. Bougatsos's vocals - never fully comprehensible at the best of times - are reduced to shards of emotion and fragments of half-heard poetry: "I care for you like a mother"; "we can find our way"; "do you feel what I feel?"
The fundamental controlled instability that characterises Gang Gang Dance's music remains: the band constantly shapeshift, and the ground on which they stake their positions seems in constant, disorientating state of flux. Combined with the thunderous drums that underpin the album, metaphors of natural disasters constantly spring to mind; but Gang Gang Dance's mastery of their techniques is such that while their music bends and stretches further than one imagines it can, it never breaks or crumbles. They are both irresistible force and immovable object: their foundations are solid enough that one feels they can always spring back into a track's original groove, no matter how far they depart from it.
Indeed, for all that the sheer force of Gang Gang Dance's music evokes the raging destruction of a natural disaster, it's this firm strength that persists as the common thread running through the tumult. They are a band who are no strangers to upheaval and indeed, nature's most curious ways. In 2002, bassist Nathan Maddox was killed by a bolt of lightning on a Chinatown rooftop. More recently, as the band were touring Europe to promote Saint Dymphna - at the peak of both their own powers and critical plaudits - a fire in an Amsterdam club destroyed the majority of their equipment, forcing them to cancel the tour. It may be a stretch to call Eye Contact a direct response to their experiences, but the elemental vitality running through it is undeniable, the band frantically cramming their ideas on to record as though their lives depend on it. One is left with the impression that these are people who particularly prize being alive.
Alex MacPherson is a regular contributor to The Review. His work can be found in The Guardian and New Statesman.
