ALBUM REVIEW: Dance Gavin Dance – ‘Pantheon’

Dance Gavin Dance albums have long been like a checkup at the dentist—you don’t really want to do it; you might be a little concerned about what you’ll find beforehand; and when it’s over, the relief that it’s done for a while is immense. The fact that their music carries the sensation of a pneumatic drill slipping in your mouth and puncturing your cerebral cortex is also relevant.

Yeah, safe to say, we’re not exactly lovers of Dance Gavin Dance ‘round these parts. Apparently, that’s a bit of a contentious opinion, though it’s difficult to see how. In the extended family of the scene, Dance Gavin Dance have easily been one of the biggest and most consistent irritants around, bafflingly influential and yet somehow worst than basically everyone they’ve spawned. And what’s worse is that it’s never amounted to more than a horrid, astringent taste that lasts for too long. Ten albums have preceded Pantheon, and if not for the highly-publicised shifts undertaken, the likelihood is this would’ve ended up exactly the same as those.

That’s one unequivocal positive you can attribute to Pantheon from the very beginning: Dance Gavin Dance have isolated the problem and eliminated it. The problem is named Tilian Pearson. For one, the sexual assault allegations held against him were never just going to vanish, and stepping away for a while (i.e. not even five months) to ‘work on himself’ hardly feels proportional. Less talked-about are the mass, widespread casualties that Pearson has caused thanks to that shambles of a voice of his. In a perpetual state of sounding like his larynx is seconds from collapsing in on itself, Pearson might have been unable to produce a single appealing vocal performance in his entire Dance Gavin Dance tenure. On top of that, his charisma-void may actively have sucked the good out of what was around him, leading to the noxious, clandestine mathcore asepsis of a truly awful career.

So when you see that the officially given reason for Pearson’s for-good leave is ‘creative differences’, there might actually be some merit to that when Pantheon feels so much better to listen to. Seriously, the quality on display here compared to previous works is like night and day, and not even through substantive revision, either. Pantheon still bears almost every foundational hallmark of a Dance Gavin Dance album; the only difference is, apparently, some divine hand has decided that it can all work now.

On vocals now is Eidola frontman Andrew Wells, whose other band are one of the many DGD protégés out there who’ve routinely surpassed their mentors in output quality. (Granted, this year’s Eidola album Mend wasn’t very good, but it’s good to see Wells bouncing back on Pantheon.) It should go without saying that he’s a far better frontman than Pearson was, simply for having a voice that doesn’t sound like it’s already projecting through the plastic wrap around the CD case. The influx of expressiveness and character never goes unnoticed, especially on a song like Trap Door whose attempt to stack hook upon hook would’ve resulted in horrific overstimulation previously. Now, they’re able to engender a wound-tight Panic! At The Disco and make a fleet landing.

It’s worth noting that Jon Mess is also here to reprise his role as vocal foil, and there’s still a zaniness in his screams that can be more hit-or-miss. There’s the odd production effect to mirror that, too, chiefly the wet emo-rap glug you’ll find on The Conqueror Worm and Space Cow Initiation Ritual. And, yeah, these aren’t great, but never are they too in the way, either. It’s almost like the positive atmosphere around Pantheon has left it cleansed, reducing what would’ve been stockpiled annoyances into buzzing flies able to be batted away. It bears reiterating that that’s such a better outcome. The bugbears of old may peep out—the ghost of Pearson’s dead voice seems to halfway manifest through Wells on The Peak Of Superstition—but they’re the exception this time, thankfully.

At this point, it’s worth stating outright that most of Pantheon’s praise does sit in relation to past Dance Gavin Dance works. When the improvement leap has been this steep this soon, it’s almost impossible for it not to. And maybe that’s not the most—for lack of a better word—‘proper’ way to view things, but you also can’t complain with results. It was the absence of good that ended up doing in Dance Gavin Dance, and now that there is good (and it’s flooded its way into all the right places), you want to celebrate that, right? It makes sense, especially with proof that something can be made from what’s existed at the core for so long.

Pantheon, then, retains the garish colours and animated-at-all-times presentation, now with a much fresher outlook. No longer is the production so canned and sterile; there’s texture to feel and play with. The album is allowed some oxygen as a result, which does wonders for cultivating scale and importance. With as many albums as Dance Gavin Dance shovel out in such quick succession, there’s never been the chance for something like that to soak. Here, though, even the little things have more going for them. The bullish, guttural refrain on Midnight At McGuffy’s walks through the components of a bad birthday and still earns its place amongst Pantheon’s trophy case of earworms. Later on Space Cow Initiation Ritual, there’s an inconsequential-at-best feature from P-funk icon George Clinton, but as a means of legitimising this incarnation of Dance Gavin Dance, letting them share airtime with a bona fide legend will certainly do it.

By the end of it all, the density means that Pantheon begins to really feel its length, but that hardly seems worth complaining about now. In any other circumstance, that’d be another fault compounded into the mutant mass that is a Dance Gavin Dance album; here, it’s another one of those minor blips mentioned earlier. And that’s still kind of mind-blowing that it’s Dance Gavin Dance producing something like this. But it seems that even the ugliest of ducklings has a swan in them (pardon the pun), albeit one still draped in garish colours and plumage that refuses to be refined. All it took was some much-needed excision (that should’ve been carried a long time ago, but better late than never), and the willingness to actually make something of themselves with the assets at hand. Who knew that they actually had it ‘em, eh?

For fans of: Eidola, Hail The Sun, Circa Survive

‘Pantheon’ by Dance Gavin Dance is released on 12th September on Rise Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall