Dance Band – Returns from the Land After Tomorrow
By Dustin Nelson
If Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks was an album, it would be The Dance Band Returns from the Land After Tomorrow, an album complete with cameo appearances, comic book irony and invading aliens. The major difficulty with this album is finding a balance between their ironic, playful take on dance-infused hip hop, and the fine execution of their odd take on the genre. It can be hard not to smile at songs like “Stagger Slide”, when the hooks include lines like, “This is how you dance when you die…Stagger Slide…These are the moves you do when the dead come alive”, or call-and-response sequences that follow “What do we want?” with “Brains!” But they nonetheless have constructed an album that can juxtapose these lines with catchy hooks and great dance beats.
Despite the sometimes off-putting saturation of irony, The Dance Band really makes this style work for them. Tracks like “Clap Your Hands” and “Best Dance Alliance”, done with local favorites Best Friends Forever, can only leave you dancing in your seat. The moment the album starts to become far less effective is during the sparse R&B ballads, which are equally ironically induced, but the precision that makes their formula work is missing in songs like “Spacelady”. It is this precision, when working, which is their real success. Even with tales of space invaders, rising dead bodies and chants of “MISSISSIPPI”, The Dance Band proves to be a talented group constructing solid hip hop songs; the quality of the music, generally, never suffers for the sake of humor or shtick.
Filed under: Music Reviews
