Watch any live footage of Gang Gang Dance and your eyes will eventually fall on Brian DeGraw, stuck in a corner of the stage, clutching a drum stick between his teeth, seemingly doing five different things at once. It's not hard to imagine him holed up in a studio into the wee hours, relentlessly tweaking the band's sound until he gets it just right. His group's desire to pull so many styles into their music calls for that level of detail—without it they'd be wading through a morass of overlapping genres with no central unified force to lean on. bEEdEEgEE is DeGraw's solo guise, but it's not so different to his work elsewhere. SUM/ONE, his debut LP under this name, has an air of familiarity, with DeGraw's fondness for splicing up musical juxtapositions executed with the same feel of floaty optimism that pervades the most recent Gang Gang Dance records.
What's most surprising about this album is how little it strays from DeGraw's tried and tested formula. There are snatches of feel-good balearic house getting scuffed up by grime and trap-influenced beats, often layered over with the kind of sheer synth lines that surfaced often on 2011's Eye Contact. SUM/ONE feels very much a part of the Gang Gang eco-system instead of a branch away from it, ultimately resembling a natural extension of work undertaken in his day job instead of a chance to try out new ideas. If there is a difference it's in the lack of cohesion. The best Gang Gang Dance songs tend to find a point where ragged post-punk thinking can sit comfortably with hippy idealism. Here, on idea-packed tracks like "Helium Anchor" and "Bricks", the transitions are less fluid, the movement more blocky. There's a sense of ill-fitting pieces not quite finding the right space in which to come together.
Fortunately there are plenty of moments here when DeGraw eases up on the clutter, giving SUM/ONE an acre or two of room to stretch out into. "Like Rain Man" is the most successful collaborative track, perhaps because it's with his Gang Gang bandmate Lizzi Bougatsos, but also due to its slow-reveal nature. Elsewhere, Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor has the effect of turning the sound a little too close to his own band, while a couple of attempts at working in a pure pop template fall flat. Even those ventures feel anchored in DeGraw's other world, with customary raindrop keyboard sounds stirred into the mix, coupled with a bout of genre hopping through a diverse, if slightly predictable, array of styles. It doesn't add much to what DeGraw has achieved elsewhere, but the overall feel is of a welcome gap-filler for anyone looking for a fix in between albums by his other band.
In a sense SUM/ONE suffers because of the higher standards DeGraw has already set. A track like "Overlook" is a decent halfway point between stuttering rhythms and sunshine pop, but it doesn't naturally sit with much else here until he loops back around to something resembling it with the closing "Quantum Poet Riddim". Gang Gang Dance records function as tight, intransigent worlds, but here there's too much fraying around the edges, too many loose ideas left to flap around in the breeze. It resembles a users guide to the building blocks DeGraw utilizes before he stitches his ideas together, almost feeling instructional in tone. This is a set of arrangements looking for a song, ultimately lacking the emotional dark/light contrast that DeGraw can usually divine from the source material he plunders. It's an intermittently thoughtful album, but one that doesn't stray far from offering process-laid-bare insight into the beautiful pile-up that is Gang Gang Dance.
