There is something hypnotic about a good 10-minute-plus dance song. As a genre, electronic music is too diverse for me to make any overarching statement about it. Sometimes songs work for me, sometimes they don’t.
I’m really digging on Justice lately (as in, since yesterday morning) and Four Tet’s “Love Cry” is amazing, I could listen to that song over and over again.
But perhaps my favorite epic dance song is, on the surface, the complete antithesis of a dance song. of Montreal’s “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal” is about the dissolution of a relationship. The lyrics are painfully raw and straightforward, yet they are backed by music that dares you to stand still, as if Kevin Barnes is violently expelling the relationship through cathartic beats and pulsing bass.
With lines like “I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met /Who could appreciate Georges Bataille” and “Somehow you’ve red-rovered the gestapo circling my heart /And nothing can defeat you,” the song manages to take the intensely personal and make it universal and propulsive. Astonishing.
If real life were like the movies, this song would blast in a club and the entire crowd would synchronize into an orgasmic orgy of dance. Sigh.
Listen with the bass up loud.
10 Cities/10 Years 