T.S.O.L. - Dance With Me

There seems to be two camps in the entire Goth punk circuit: those who dig the Misfits and those who dig True Sounds Of Liberty. I may be in the minority here, but I liked T.S.O.L. more.
Dance With Me is sometimes considered landmark SoCal punk album, but most of that high praise may be coming from people who should know better. The reality is that Dance With Me is a shitty and barely credible display of rumdumb macabre housed in simplistic three-chord punk rock.
And I love it.
It’s not for everyone, which was in consideration when I rated this thing, but for me it’s a shining piece of my early forays into punk rock, when songs about necrophilia were cool.
Seriously, “Code Blue” may have been the vilest song ever recorded at one time, with lines like “Don’t even cry if I shoot it in her hair/Lying on the table she smiles and she stares” it’s far from fucking Shakespeare, but now it just sounds silly. Which is exactly what it was back then, but as you age, you’re told that you’re not to like silly stuff.
Fuck that shit! Practically any fan of the electric guitar would acknowledge that the riff on “Code Blue” is pretty sweet, despite the fact that almost anyone could learn how to play it after a few tries. That’s the essence of rock music, and if all these guys know how to do is throw a few creature-feature lines about fucking dead chicks because none of the chicks at school like ‘em, then so be it.
When T.S.O.L. works at trying to sound really creepy, they simply start throwing horror movie plots around and begin every line in a first person narrative. “Silent Scream” features lyrics cobbled together from old Vincent Price films (“I’m the wooden mallet/The sharpened stake/I’m the precaution you forgot to take”) to the point where you actually lose track at how scary the character is because of all the clichéd lyrical overkill.
When T.S.O.L. isn’t trying to use scare tactics, they mine topics from other places like spy movies (“The Triangle”), unrequited love (“Love Story”) and general teenage alienation (“I’m Tired Of Life”). None of Dance With Me is groundbreaking now and, to be honest, none of it was all that groundbreaking then. Essentially, most of what T.S.O.L. did was understand that they weren’t really cut out for making much of a political or social statement in their music and they left that tasks to more of the more memorable bands from that same era (Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, etc.). Besides, everyone knows that even though Ed Wood movies aren’t that scary, they’re still pretty fucking awesome.