Orange County's Dance With The Dead have stunned the synthwave community with a series of amazing releases over the past few years and rightfully they have earned a large following. The Shape, their latest offering came out earlier this year and it's one of the standouts from the excessive number of releases the genre has to offer in 2016.
Apart from the almost ritualistic qualities of opening track, There's A Storm Coming, and Adrift, the whimsical slow burner that drops midway through the album, on the rest of The Shape DWTD are relentless. As the album's non-stop frenetic energy is headbanging worthy, DWTD once again show off their songwriting skills, not holding back on the throbbing beats nor the tantalizing guitar solos, all of which come in abundance.
That said, The Shape seems to shine more vividly in the form of those pair of offbeat tracks, on which the production sounds more mature and sophisticated and the overall ambience is irresistibly alluring to the listener. If there was a little more of wizardry like that where There's A Storm Coming came from, The Shape would have been a tough to beat contender for the title of the damn finest synthwave release of 2016.
ZR