Gala Drop's Balearic sound entered the wider dance music consciousness with Overcoat Heat, a 2010 release for Golf Channel. Since then, they collaborated with Ben Chasny of Six Organs Of Admittance and toured with Panda Bear. For II, Gala Drop have brought Detroit expat Jerry The Cat into the fold. He's known for his collaborations with Arttu on Clone Royal Oak and has also worked with Motor City mainstays Funkadelic, Parliament, Derrick May, Moodymann and Theo Parrish.
Jerry draws comparisons between Detroit's mishmash of music scenes and what he's found in Lisbon. He says: "Detroit wound up a city with so much contamination between styles, from Motown to garage rock and then the birth of techno. Lisbon felt like that when I moved here too, I was going out to a techno club at the weekend but going to see a garage rock show or some free jazz band in the week. The post-Millennium Lisbon has been very fertile musically speaking." His bandmate Nelson Gomes also operates Príncipe, the label that brought DJ Marfox and his cohort to the world.
`Nü-Balearica', `Motorik-Worldbeat',`Neo-Detroitist-Funk' are the increasingly imaginative adjectives that have been used to describe Gala Drop's sound. And while the accuracy of these terms is up for some debate, they serve to illustrate how tough it's been to pigeonhole the group due to their broad range of influences. Indeed, their self-titled 2009 debut saw the Lisbon based quartet - unfettered by geographical specifics - cherry-picking elements of their favourite music from around the world and absorbing it into a singularly idiosyncratic sound; incorporating aspects of dub, Afrobeat, prog, psychedelia, house, funk and the bounce of their native Portuguese rhythms.
ii follows a similar path. `You and I' sets the stage early for many of their recurrent sonic motifs; opening to the shimmer of glitchy house-infused electro and serpentine melodies that slowly draw you deep into a darkened dub flecked echo chamber. Elsewhere, 'All Things' takes the conceit of a slow reggae jam and gradually builds to a rapid-fire crescendo; hyper kinetic percussion breaking over gentle waves of synth. Album highlights 'Sun Gun' and `Let It Go' mix exotic rhythms and tribal beats into a woozy, poly-rhythmic cocktail, the latter bopping along with hypnotic house sirens and a winding funk bassline, while the former's jittery Roy Ayer's-esque flavour conjures up images of warm climes and sun-dappled waters. By rights the results of this intriguing `post-world music' (which is my contribution to the growing list of descriptive terms for their sound) should feel like an godawful mess. But - in no small part to their accomplished musicianship - it manages to hold together with a surprising level of assuredness.
