The Last Dance

“In the hypothetical (nightmare) scenario of being limited to listening to no more than 100 songs for the rest of my life, "The Last Dance" would 100% make the cut. Disco Inferno were always an intriguing band, but they were almost never as outright accessible as this (they made plenty of catchy, memorable songs, but they did that on their own terms). It's one of those songs I come back to every so often and find myself completely re-immersed in again. My lazy summary-advertisement of this song is "the best New Order song that they had nothing to do with" (though Michael Johnson, who did loads of work behind the board for New Order, did produce this song). Soaring guitar pop standing on a bubbling bassline, twinkling synthesizers and a drum machine. Lyrically, "The Last Dance" addresses the anxiety of living in the shadow cast from millennia of human invention. In one regard, that's creative invention, the ever-expanding challenge posed to the modern artist to produce something original and worthy without merely rehashing what has come before or been done more capably by the talents of another. In a different sense, it's destructive invention, the continual evolution of warfare that poses a perpetual threat to erase both the creator and their work, or anything else we hold precious, in the devastation of artless, fruitless combat: "And a fear of the future beats so deep in our hearts That they'll all but destroy ourselves Like the centuries-old feuds Being upgraded with high-tech weapons In the end it's not the future But the past that'll get us" But, in the end, a resolution is made to reject fatalism and creative pessimism and push on anyhow: "But now my eyes point ahead / away from the ghosts of the dead."”