It’ll end up being just another day for the majority of us. We’ll be safe, thank the Heavens. We’ll wake up, go to work and fall into our sleep, tired and ready to forget about this world. And while some, in a different era, where dangers were much more common, it might sound like a wonderful existence, for the modern man, this is a quiet tragedy unfolding day after day, always the same.
What’s the solution? To break the monotony. To test the limits and, of course, push human creativity to its outer limits. It takes discipline, conviction, and, let’s face it, a little bit of that madness that great art always seems to have at its disposal. This is what EWAH has brought to “SPIRITUAL DANCE,” nothing more and nothing less.
It’s not an album written in ordinary circumstances either. These are a series of dreams about one’s teenage years. The dreams occurred in a dance studio in Tasmania, Australia, and the songs came quickly. EWAH’s mission was to catch one a day and tell the story from its beginning to its conclusion.
Just listen to the opening song, “G Boogie,” which arrives just after a mysterious beat set up as the intro. The song, with its languid beat à la 90s Tricky and detuned vocal samples, is meant to have a mesmeric effect to push you deep into the story before you’ve had a chance to know fully what’s going on.
The same tone is maintained for “Do Wop Bop,” a track that sounds like a glam-rock teenage anthem being played by The Kills with assistance from Depeche Mode.
It’s a tale best told through sound and understood through instinct and mood. True to the album’s name, the songs feel like they’re meant to accompany dancing. But as you listen to a song like “Run,” you understand that this is music that encourages spontaneous movement, the kind that occurs because of too much tension that needs to be somehow consumed.
“When I Hear the Music,” with its cascading synth arpeggios and hypnotic, repetitive melodies, feels like some ancient spell being told on a mountain cliff. And “Climb to the Sky” feels almost like an old Gospel number appropriated and reinterpreted.
Where does it all leave us? Trying to make sense of the past in any way that we can. We’ll dance, dream and tell all the stories that we can remember. This is what EWAH has done here, and the result, “SPIRITUAL DANCE,” is something hypnotic, something that can only be understood instinctively.
