Album Review: Dance Gavin Dance – Artificial Selection

California post-punk band Dance Gavin Dance knocks it out of the park with their eighth album
(originally published for The Phoenix News, in a print issue)

Back in 2018, I wrote a bunch of reviews that I couldn’t publish anywhere. So I’m putting them here.

Artificial Selection, the eighth and latest album by California-based post-punk band Dance Gavin Dance, is an aggressively unique musical experience. With songs ranging from wistful indie-pop to extreme metal – often within the same track – Artificial Selection has a little something for everyone.

The driving force behind Artificial Selection is guitarist Will Swan, who pulls off highly technical riffs in every song that still manage to be endlessly catchy. Swan’s approach to songwriting is a delight to listen to, regularly defying conventional rock and pop song structure to produce songs with several distinct parts, almost like separate movements. Despite its catchy hooks, clean instrumentation, and short song lengths, Artificial Selection most often feels like a progressive rock album.
This is most pronounced on singles “Care” and “Count Bassy”, each of which sounds like it could be multiple songs, but without ever sounding disjointed.
Swan is backed up by bassist Tim Feerick – who, fittingly, gets a great bassline and solo on “Count Bassy” – as well as a team of guest guitarists, including Zachary Garren, Martin Bianchini, Louie Baltazar, and Andrew Wells. Wells, in particular, is notable for his excellent guest vocals on album-closer “Evaporate”.

Drummer Matt Mingus rounds out the band’s instrumental section. Mingus’s drumming is phenomenal, even giving Swan and his guitar crew a run for their money on tracks like “Son of Robot”, “Midnight Crusade”, and “Hair Song”.

Pulling vocal and lyrical duty is the odd couple of Jon Mess and Tillian Pearson. Mess provides harsh vocals and screams, contrasting with Pearson’s soaring pop-crooning. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pearson ends up setting the tone of the album, as his vocals make up the majority of choruses, as well as the most memorable parts of most songs. Not to discount Mess, whose screams complement Pearson better than they ought to, and lend each song an extra helping of character In some of the album’s best tracks, the singers’ different approaches end up creating bizarre, but intriguing juxtapositions. The best example of this is on the track “Bloodsucker”, in which Pearson sings ambiguous lyrics about social vampirism while Mess entertainingly screams about a much more literal interpretation of the title. Despite starting with some silly, random-sounding lyrics – “I’mma cook a brat like I cook a filet” is a particularly weird one – as the song goes on, the juxtaposition between Pearson’s lyrics and Mess’ makes it sound like the hyperactive inner-dialog of a disillusioned cynic.

Swan mentioned in the lead-up to the album that most of Artificial Selection was written as singles, and it shows. Not one track on the album is skippable. Singles “Son of Robot”, “Care”, and “Midnight Crusade” are absurdly catchy masterpieces of technical post-hardcore. “Evaporate” incorporates elements of other Dance Gavin Dance songs in a beautiful piece of fanservice. “Gospel Burnout”, “Slouch”, and “Flash” have a bit more pop-appeal without sacrificing any of the album’s metal credentials. “Story of My Bros” and “Bloodsucker” are hilarious, maybe-deep songs that are just fun to comb through lyrically.
Despite its name, Artificial Selection is a natural contender for album of the year.

9/10