#2660 The Dancing Did - And Did Those Feet

To the extent that you can accept that multiple bands can be the best band ever, the Dancing Dead are the best band ever.

I feel a Nik Cohn level of evangelism around this band.

This album is everything right.

It is Minutemen, The Unicorns, Wire, Boredoms, it is ----------

There's a song called:

The Rhythm Section Sticks Together

and it's the perfect encapsulation, tightness and madcap unpredictability, done in 2 minutes or less.

It's a band aware of itself in only the best way. Packed with half-hooks and darkened energy, that impossible combination of sincerity and technicality that only the abovementioned achieved. The Dancing Did don't sound like anyone else, don't fit cleanly into any sound at all, but spooled out a a strangely natural combination of immediate riffs and crackling patience. It's all so assured, the way a second wave band might when backed by a label or scene or sound, but it's out of thin air circa '82, full of alien strangeness and offkilter menace, always keeping you on the back foot, packing in an extra beat or measure or bridge, or dropping one, like some strange northern Flying Nun cousin.

If I had to send an album into space to tell aliens what art rock was, this would be on the shortlist. Or maybe post-punk, though my grip on that term slips every day. It has every ounce of energy and grit and cleverness, it is ground zero for so many things I love about other bands, at once totally arch and without archness. Any pretension is baked in and not put on. It is narrative and strange and personal and detached, it is Slint and Pixies and Chad VanGaalen and more. It is _ele_ccctr_icc_. Good god, The Headmaster and the Fly. Good god.

An album that connects both musically and attitudewise, on point. It is Is This It, Separation Sunday, Damned Damned Damned, etc.

An album that makes you want to scratch your beard and thrash around and start a band and burn down the world. I know I've been rating shit highly lately, but if you want to spend 40 minutes understanding what I think is right in music you could scarcely do better 4.5/5