The Big Apple loves its misfits. Gang Gang Dance is made up of just the sort of musical oddballs that New Yorkers should be proud to call their own. Since getting together five years ago, this foursome has been tearing up nearly every art-house rock club in America. Along the way, they've lost one of their members, two of them have become a couple, and they've started to take their music more seriously. The band that used to leave their audiences frustrated and running for the bar has begun making music that makes you want to listen up.
Until recently, Gang Gang Dance was an aural assault of sudden and terrifying tempo changes, a mishmash of random instruments overlaid with vocalist Lizzi Bougatsos's Yoko-esque panting. You get the picture. Their songwriting took a backseat to the band's attitude, to put it nicely. "We played so many shows with a couple of kids with guitars on the floor with a bunch of pedals," recalls drummer Tim DeWit, 31. "I never listened to any of that bullshit at home. I listen to Hot 97!" In part, the members of Gang Gang Dance view their early endeavors as a reaction to the New York band phenomenon, which included the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Strokes. "At that time there were a million little bands popping up," says DeWit. "I don’t think we would have called ourselves a band. Now it's reversed a bit." God's Money (The Social Registry), Gang Gang Dance's second album, is more polished. Songs like "Egowar," "Nomad for Love (Cannibal)" and "Before My Voice Fails" combine a free-jazz aesthetic with Middle Eastern melodies. Bougatsos's singing has also become softer and more nuanced.
In addition to Bougatsos and DeWit, the band includes Brian DeGraw (keyboards, percussion) and Josh Diamond (guitar). Tracing the story of how they met is like piecing together the East Coast's millennial music puzzle. DeGraw and DeWit became friends in Washington, D.C., in 1993, where they had both moved after they finished high school. "D.C. was a very, very small scene," says DeWit. "Fugazi and the Make-Up all lived in the same neighborhood. We lived in one of those houses that was established by the Nation of Ulysses." DeGraw, 31, Bougatsos’s boyfriend, picks up the story: "I was trying to go to art school but I quit. Tim was working at Tower Records—just normal teenage stuff—and then we started this real band, the Crainium. Jim from the Centuries was the lead singer. And Matt and Brian [from A.R.E. Weapons] had moved down from Massachusetts for the same reason, to make music. We all lived in the same house."
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