Marvelous! The first tunes of Helios sound… flashback… and I find myself back at Time Zero from 1995 album Everspring. It feels like as if DANCE OR DIE never has been disappeared.
But they did… for 10 years. On hiatus, disbanded, vanished into thin air, nobody knows. Forgotten by the scene. I also cannot remember to have seen both founders Andreas Goldacker (A.N.G.O.) and Gary Wagner (Wagner) surfacing in other bands and projects during the last decade.
Anyways, DANCE OR DIE is back, celebrating its 20th anniversary (first record) or 10th anniversary (the last one) optionally, and delivers an opulent double CD comeback album entitled Nostradamnation. They pick up the thread where everything was left with Schlafende Energie in 2001. The groove is still there, the darkness and the melancholy. The production is of course modern, perfectly fitting to the new decade’s sound techniques, but in a wonderfully unobtrusive way.
There is actually nothing to nag about at all. Once again the Berlin-based act offers their unique cross-over mélange of dancefloor killers such as Helios and Sleeping In Your Grave, go wild and romantic with Northern Winter and Empty Heart and unleash harsh electro attacks with 4 3 2 - Dance Or Die and Purgatory. Just great. On the bonus CD one will find five remixes of older tracks. That’s of course debatable, especially since remixes aren’t that far away from the originals and hardly offer anything new or outstanding. As for Nostradamnation itself I have to say: it’s an amazing comeback album! 9 points!