Danse Macabre’s ‘The Golden Age of Ballooning’ EP introduces five songs which indulge in the follies of love, life and death; often all three in the same breath. These are tales of doomed relationships and broken dreams, of unrequited love which even the grave cannot contain. The band’s distinctive dual vocals and progressive melodies bring a sense of theatre to proceedings, the drama infected throughout with underlying dark sentiments.
Bringing cabaret show-tune sensibilities to the world of rock music, Danse Macabre’s sound is characterised by bright tunes and bittersweet lyrics. The unofficial story of time-travelling exiles from the alternative dimension of Prozakville County is full of misconceptions and contradictions. The band themselves have talked about honing their skills on the music hall circuit of Victorian London and in the cabaret bars of Berlin during the Weimar Republic. They will also tell you how, when they found themselves stranded in the early twenty-first-century, they bought electric guitars and injected a heavy dose of rock into their songs. Danse Macabre’s live shows mix the light with the dark, with their heavier rock numbers such as ‘Waking the Dead’ and ‘Killer Squirrels’ contrasting dynamically with the lighter numbers found on their debut EP ‘The Golden Age of Ballooning’. The result is true folk-rock cabaret, a genre Danse Macabre have made their own.
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