FAC. Dance 2...party like it's 1982

I so, so, so enjoyed this one...

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Fac. Dance 02
(Strut)

The second in Strut's survey of Factory Records' dance-electronic side goes deeper into the well of early 1980s dub-funk-world-punk, revisiting Fac. Dance 01 favorites like A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column, ESG and 52nd Street and branching out into the wilder, southern-hemisphere-sampling hybrids like Fadela and X-O-Dus.

The material comes from the first half of the 1980s, the same period during which most of Joy Division reformed as New Order and established it dark, dance-oriented new sound. Yet at the same time, lots of other loosely aligned bands were attempting the same alchemy, splicing the knotty, twitchy dissonance of post-punk to sinuous, body-moving grooves. Consider the Wake's 1983 "The Host," a knife-edge blend of shudder and sigh, dark blasts of synthesizer flaring up from a sensualist's bedrock of bass and drums (that's Bobby Gillespie, pre-Jesus & Mary Chain, on drums), and Caesar McInulty murmuring alienated phrases over. It is nearly eight minutes long, an endless, hypnotic, hip-centric groove that has just enough punk disaffection to give it bite.

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