Last Dance, The – Reflections Of Rage

The latest album by The Last Dance is only partially by The Last Dance themselves. 3 out of the 15 tracks are done by this progressive darkwave band, the other tracks are old The Last Dance tracks, mainly from the “Whispers in rage” album. These tracks are remixed or even rerecorded by artists like L’Ame Immortelle, Corvus Corax and CyrusRex (Skinny Puppy).

It has been a while since we last heard from The Last Dance. This mainly can be attributed to the unfortunate death of drummer Ivan Dominguez, on tour in Belgium in 2002. But from the three tracks on this CD we can hear they are back with full force. Espcially “Simplicity” proves this point, the driving guitars come together with the strong voice of Jeff Diehm, producing a darkwave song that is wellworth listening to. “Desperately still” is a song that is lacking in strength, but somehow works very well as an opening track. The third new track however, is a very weak cover of “Oops I did it again”. All The Last Dance has done with this cover is prove that even this already very bad song can be weakened.

As noted the other songs on this album are other bands remixing The Last Dance songs or covering them. These versions are more danceable and most of them really add to the original version of the song, recreating it at times, other times just adding very small bits or leaving away some layers.

The combination of covers and new songs creates an album that isn’t balanced. Some of the songs are good in themselves, but the cd sounds more like a compilation then it does as a new album from The Last Dance. Then again it’s great they are back after the disaster that struck them and I’m very curious what they will bring us with their coming full album.

artist: Last Dance, The
label: Dancing Ferret Discs
details: 2004, 15 tracks