Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E,” Asher Roth’s “I Love College” and Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” did a good job of convincing everybody that the bars and parties merely existed for dancing and revelry. Thankfully, the new album “Plays Music” from Thieves Like Us actually grounds itself in the reality of the dance floor and builds equally from indulgent revolt and the desires of the lonely. Sure, this generation may find freedom in the drunken movements of their body, but they are equally interested in the beautiful transcendent fuck at the end of the night that never gets found.
Thieves Like Us hit the scene with rave anthem “Drugs in My Body,” a single that served as a mission statement for this LP. The keyboards and drums move cyclically as perpetually “the days they go fast, the nights they go slow.” The singer searches for somebody, pumping drugs into his body and hitting up parties with an end goal to “stay up late put some heat in my heartache.” In the video for the song, an iconic group of teens vandalize a mall and hit the dance floor over and over until a young couple breaks off, fleeing into a night of sexual release.
The bass and drum lines of many of the songs trundle like trains and taxi cabs taking the lonely into the city and back out. While all of the album’s denizens are looking for somebody to remove their sense of isolation, only a few are willing to take what they can get, “a free release, a soft affair” or to put it more vulgarly, they ask themselves, “Should I fall inside her?” The others are held back by girlfriends, lofty goals and self-imposed morals. They never find release and instead rely on parachuting ecstasy in the bathroom and staring across the dance floor “paralyzed, unflirting.”
It sounds depressing but let’s be honest, the bars are equally depressing and freeing. For every beautiful besparkled Aphrodite out that night, there’s a matching smacked out mess puking in the toilet alone. Dance music lately has made us believe that the Long Islands we plow through to free our bodies on the floor are statements of revolution. It’s not always true; sometimes we’re just trying to escape the pangs of isolation stirred by our aimless lives. There is nothing better than grinding up on somebody to a song that can say that. Thieves Like Us have plenty of songs that can.