Gang Gang Dance: Eye Contact

Gang Gang Dance dabbles with genres enough to earn the normally dubious tag “experimental.” But the Brooklyn quartet is rooted in post-punk, and on its fifth full-length, it evokes a number of ’80s touchstones, from the cobwebbed vocal echo and Dracula-coated synths of the self-explanatory “Adult Goth” to “Chinese High,” where ping-ponging blips and Lizzi Bougatsos’ keenly pitched vocals play as a tribute to any number of new-wave one-hit wonders. 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. The result seems loose even when the tempos are fast, as on “MindKilla,” which follows the toe-dips the band made into house music and grime on 2008’s Saint Dymphna by adapting an old rave-anthem slogan for its hook (from Eon’s “Fear: The Mindkiller”) and featuring a glitchy synth breakdown.