The Dance’s complete catalog: Soul Force, In Lust, and Do Dada, their ground-breaking music from the early ’80s, has been reissued by the Modern Harmonic label.
Emerging at the turn of the decade from punk’s 3-chord nihilism, whose idea of dancing was to jump up and down or bang heads, The Dance brought a free-wheeling, jagged dissonant art-funk stomp you couldn’t help but move your body to. They ushered the migration from downtown clubs like CBGB & Max’s to the uptown Hurrah, Danceteria, and Peppermint Lounge, where DJs now held forth between live sets with a return to self-invented fashion. The Dance also surfed the emerging post-punk No Wave scene around them, along with the B-52s, DEVO, James Chance, Lydia Lunch, and PiL.
The band then fronted by lead vocalist/lyricist and pumping organist, Eugenie Diserio and co-founder/guitarist/writer, Steven Alexander created music and performed live shows that brought sensuality, romance, and old-school glam to a dyspeptic world.
Some 40 years later, Do Dada, In Lust, and Soul Force sound like they were recorded yesterday. The angular beats, primal percussion, and funky bottom are as dynamic as ever, offering a time capsule of the band from 1980-’83. Eugenie’s words find their fullest flowering on Soul Force, which Steven describes as achieving a moment of “clarity” and "an aura of loss and hopefulness” that she had been aiming for.
