Digital Dance Treatment CD

Never having released a full album or even an EP, Digital Dance's legacy was reduced to a cult connection thanks to their role as a pre-eminent post-punk touchstone for Belgium (the performances with Joy Division certainly didn't hurt). Treatment puts the band in a much better context, drawing from most of its four singles, a variety of demos, and a couple of live performances covering its period of active existence from 1979 to 1982. Given the band's shifting lineup around a central core of singer/musician Jerry WX and guitarist Stephan Barbery, Treatment is by default as much a fractured portrayal as it is a definitive one but heard all at once, the disc holds together very well, the only specific gap being the cover of Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity" which was their debut A-side. Thin as the recordings often sound, the band's music early on owed an obvious enough debt to Talking Heads' own initial efforts, but in a way that helped them beat plenty of other bands to the punch, since songs like "All Those Words" and "Faulty" could just as easily have been in the set lists of groups like the Feelies and the Embarrassment. Its A-sides are a wonderfully wry group of songs that have a well-produced freshness that holds up nearly thirty years on, with the nervy kick of "I Sleep on the Waves" and the spare funk of the title track as definite highlights of a strong catalog further expanded by good rarities such as "Human Zoo" and the lengthy, grinding but never unfocused live jam "The Night Suite." Detailed liner notes covering the band's complicated history and a variety of photos flesh out the release, proof of another fine effort courtesy of the LTM label. ~ Ned Raggett

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