{"id":14432,"date":"2018-04-16T05:30:10","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T09:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=14432"},"modified":"2018-04-15T16:13:45","modified_gmt":"2018-04-15T20:13:45","slug":"album-review-gary-numan-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/04\/16\/album-review-gary-numan-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Gary Numan \u2013 Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Casual listeners’ knowledge of Gary Numan’s body of work often doesn’t extend his hit single \u201cCars,\u201d a track from his 1979 solo debut The Pleasure Principle<\/i>. And that’s unfortunate, because Numan’s work has been consistently fascinating. He has released 20 solo albums to date (including two collaborative releases) and his most recent, 2017’s Savage (Songs from a Broken World)<\/i> ranks among his best.<\/p>\n

In 1981 Numan released his third solo set, Dance<\/i>. Titling the album thusly was an example of Numan’s deadpan humor (a quality underappreciated among those who focus on the cold robotic persona displayed in the \u201cCars\u201d video).<\/p>\n

While Dance<\/i> is very much an electronics-based album, songs like \u201cSlowcar to China\u201d make effective use of fretless bass guitar (courtesy of Japan’s Mick Karn), violin (Nash the Slash) and \u201creal\u201d drums (played by Roger Taylor of Queen). Dance<\/i> is very much of its time, yet somehow feels less dated than similarly synth-centric releases of its era.<\/p>\n

There are indeed danceable tunes on the album (\u201cNight Talk\u201d is one) but overall Dance is a moody, hypnotic set of tunes that collectively possess a kind of late-night vibe. Despite the electronics, there’s an organic, exotic feel to many of the album’s songs. Modern-day listeners may not an aesthetic similarity to David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy (\u201cHeroes,\u201d Low<\/i> and Lodger<\/i>), most explicitly in the nearly ten-minute \u201cCry the Clock Said.\u201d<\/p>\n

The original 1981 release of Dance<\/i> figuratively and literally compressed 50 minutes’ worth of music onto a single album, sacrificing fidelity and volume in the process. For the 2018 reissue from Beggars Arkive, the music has been spread across three LP sides, giving space for the music to breath. The new purple-vinyl reissue appends the original album with a new extended version of \u201cMoral,\u201d plus a singe (\u201cStromtrooper in Drag\u201d), three b-sides and an outtake of the title track.<\/p>\n

This review is part of a week-long series covering new vinyl releases and\/or reissues, including titles scheduled for special release on Record Store Day 2018, this coming Saturday (April 21). Please support your local independent record store.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Casual listeners’ knowledge of Gary Numan’s body of work often doesn’t extend his hit single \u201cCars,\u201d a track from his 1979 solo debut The Pleasure Principle. And that’s unfortunate, because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14433,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,50,64,65,73],"tags":[3394,884],"class_list":["post-14432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-electronica","category-new-wave","category-reissue","category-review","category-vinyl","tag-beggard-arkive","tag-gary-numan","cat-26-id","cat-50-id","cat-64-id","cat-65-id","cat-73-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14434,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14432\/revisions\/14434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}