Saturday night at the Bowery Ballroom, Gang Gang Dance proved to the crowd that they didn't waste their ticket money by being, well, Gang Gang Dance, i.e., a band that grabs you, pulls you in, then screams bloody murder in your face for 90 minutes. It resembles the feeling of being sucked through a black hole into another dimension, like in that book A Wrinkle in Time. Only louder.

Liz Bougatsos is the band's beautiful banshee of a vocalist, and it's her guttural, animalistic vocals, (distorted heavily, as is everything) that stand at the center of GGD's wild, weird universe. With so little delineation between songs (if they can even be called such), Bougatsos' vocal wranglings are the closest indicator of the sea changes, both subtle and bombastic, throughout the band's set. Listening to GGD, it's easy to get lost in time, but Bougatsos, a dark ringmistress, keeps the center intact.

The sound gradients shifted further as the night wore on, and the beats, in particular, overseen by keyboardist Brian DeGraw, proved surprisingly shimmery, like the music of the unicorn-inhabited world you invented in when you were six. Others were pure space age, or included synthesized horns. Three out of 4 GGD members, including Bougatsos, played some type of percussion, whether bongos, steel drum, or a gong – yes, a gong. It's this well-traveled emphasis on percussion, drawing on African, Middle Eastern and Caribbean musical styles, (besides pumping up the noise) that have always marked out GGD as pioneers.

The band, whose new album Saint Dymphna comes out in October, ended the show on hyper-speed, fitting for show already hyper-loud, hyper-wild, and hyper-unique. And did I mention hyper-loud?

-Claire Shefchik