EP review: Gang Signs, Selfitled

Interview with Dean Marino from Papermapstext: Paul Wasada

Littered with emotionally stirring vocals, and baselines guaranteed to get a body or twelve on the dance floor, Gang Signs’ self-titled eight-track debut, like others in the genre, blends the two so naturally that what is being said begins to matter less than the emotion each track is able to draw out of you.

Underlying the upbeat feel of the album is a sound reminiscent of early-90’s grunge, complete with angst and a sense of internal suffering, mixed with new age electro synths and production.

From the opening introduction to ‘Counting On You’, to the EP closer, ‘Antidote’, the Vancouver-based band delivers a dark and moody dreamscape any one of us could sit back and vibe to or spot on the house speakers of the local club. Consisting of Peter Ricq of Humans, Matea Sarenac, also known as DJ Wobang and Adam Fink, the electro act is still in its adolescence but definitely delivers a seasoned sound, thanks to the veteran know-how of its parts.

The talented trio produced 21 total songs in a year but chose to select only eight for their debut. Those tracks lucky enough to make the cut feel uniformly enveloping and spacey. While not a terrible downside, it does cause the album to feel like a run-on sentence at times, a continual roller coaster of digitally created magic where no one song truly stands alone and becomes the type of record you play front to back over and over again, left never really knowing the title of the individual tracks, but knowing the album as whole was well worth your time.

The Gang Signs EP was released August 28.

Purchase on Bandcamp