Pitchfork

There are those who make "noise," and then there are elegant, shadowy troupes cobbling ghost languages and fractured dub into undulating biospheres. Last year, Excepter's KA provided a backbeat for spinning infinitives on rusty fire escapes. And now, on their second full-length, fellow New Yorkers Gang Gang Dance have created an equally powerful record: If KA functioned as a nighttime talisman, consider God's Money its daytime companion-- music for brightly lit graffiti-scoured parks. Despite their differences, Excepter and GGD both remove restrictive compositional components and turn electro-acoustic sprawl into a generative act. It's Throbbing Gristle's "Hot on the Heals of Love" reconfigured as a deck of shards.

God's Money's exuberant decay isn't a surprise; Gang Gang Dance have been intriguing ever since the ex-Cranium, Angelblood, Ssab Songs, and Actress members deconstructed their first denouement five years ago. But despite the linked evil-eye cover art between this and last year's Fusetron gathering, this collection jump-starts a new chapter of their sonic braille: Exit distended Ono, enter jubilant rebirth.

Recorded over the course of a year at Junkyard Audio Salvage, the nine tracks are mixed smoothly, and feel woven together. Each bit has a home, like paint spread thickly across a canvas instead of in globs dropped here and there. Instrumentally, drums (hand to electronic), MIDI, synth, keys, and treated vocals gel like a percussive centipede darting through the murk of the East River.

While the quartet act as a single entity, vocalist Lizzi Bougatsos emerges as a legitimate frontwoman: She knows her Living Theater and Picabia and feels at times like Karen O performing Kurt Schwitters' "Ur Sonata". Each track finds her ranting distantly, humming internally, and intoning over that aforementioned fractal backdrop of gentle nursery-rhyme cascades and quicksilver jaunts stitched with tiny cylindrical pulses.

In a few cases, her lyrics aptly describe her function. For instance, on "Egowar", which features rain sticks turned into pan flutes by fauns, she "juggles mime with laughter." Elsewhere, "Glory In Itself" drops a "shiver of mint or rotten hay," a suitable descriptor of the album's atmosphere, before a tyrannosaurus guitar and glimmered new wave factory synth soon to be torn asunder.

It's difficult to diagram a textual storyline, but opener God's Money I (Percussion)" launches us in medias res into tribal echos, snaps, bass de-tuned drum, and vocalizations (one voice further in the distance and the other up front counterpoint). There's a break at the end that recalls a drumline circling a drain, before GGD stop on a dime and saunter in opposing directions. The album never suspends movement: It continues to pulse and breath even in its quietest moments. And in each piece, there exists an amazing freeform beauty as well as a great sense of rhythm and melody hidden within ostensible chaos.

So I'm speaking in heightened terms, sure. There's flat out so much hype in my neighborhood-- some of it deserved, quite a bit of it completely off-the-mark-- and Brooklyn's baggage has been so sweatily decried/rehashed everywhere from the tiniest zine to the Better Homes & Gardens recipe section. That kind of overkill makes me nervous, because Gang Gang Dance are one of those bands puritanical cynics avoid just because the name's dropped so regularly (and OK, they're spotted chilling with Chloe Sevigny on the downtown society page). But, whatever the art-world association or hipster evaluation points, God's Money runs laps around all those noisy minions fucking with effects pedals at their feet.