Take That Jesus
When they take them out of the CD player or navigate away from Dance Lazarus Dance’s MySpace page, most listeners will feel conned. Not for having spent money or looked at a website when they could have doing something better but because Dance Lazarus Dance aren’t the terrible sort of band their name suggests.
They’re not a band utterly without pretensions. For all to be said in their defense, this song is still called ‘Take That Jesus’.
The con is that they don’t experiment, they write songs. They don’t indulge artistic eccentricity. ‘Take That Jesus’ has no exclamation mark and is just three minutes long. In spite of a brief synthesiser solo, it’s fast, tight and the same song throughout rather than a series of underdeveloped ideas.
With the four songs on Dance Lazarus Dance’s MySpace still the extent of their available material, it’s too early to tell whether this song is a silly trick or an artistic limitation. ‘Take That Jesus’ is fun. But not interesting to contemplate.
Franz Ferdinand are the only recent band who shake the foundations of the medium and make music you can dance to. The law of averages suggests Dance Lazarus Dance probably won’t be the next.
In the meantime, they sound enough like Interpol to be worth anyone’s time and, unless the DJ announces what it’s called, ‘Take That Jesus’ shouldn’t empty any dancefloors.