pener “Make up Your Mind” wastes no time in proving that Swayzak mean business. Dance business. Guest singer Clair Dietrich makes an excellent dependent. She laments, “You’re going out with her tonight, and that’s no good”. She explains that “you can spend the night with any girl... as long as it’s not her”. The song works both as an examination of that aspect of society, as well as a wonderful dance number. As she repeats her unpleasant situation, noises whir around, as inconclusive and frustrated as our heroine. The term “make up your mind” becomes increasingly futile as she makes it known that she won’t actually do anything about this.

Dirty Dancing is full of such gems. Like “Buffalo Seven”, in which the singer explains to us amid the backdrop of dusty synths “I always use a cheap gun”. Through the album, everything is pulled off with immaculate style. Even the dark humor is delivered with a wink, the Kraftwerk influenced “In the Car Crash” being a good example of this. In the song, delivered entirely in a scratchy robotic monotone, traditional love song clichés are bent around into bizarre and violent images. “Face through the window / but you are stuck inside my head”. Gross.

Besides being a terrific dance album, Dirty Dancing is a pretty decent pop album. Most every song starts out a house anthem, but ends up as commentary. Any individual song would work very well on its own, but together, the songs share a strong rhythmic and thematic bond.

Things can get a bit repetitive, as most dance music will. But one particularly horrendous offender, “Celcius”, is pretty much a five second loop repeated for four minutes. The drums will drop out, and maybe the “duh duh duh duh” sample will get a little louder. Ah, there’s that electronic sounding metal snare again. It is actually quite bad. Though that’s just for close listening purposes, I’m sure if you were out on the dance floor, you wouldn’t care. Some mediocre melody starts in about ten seconds before the end, but that’s just enough to infuriate me.

The album is mostly brilliant. Here’s another good line, “I’ll take a chance, but I don’t want to lose.” That one is delivered by Adult’s Nicola Kuperus in the song “I Dance Alone,” although it’s nearly buried by some screaming keyboard sounds, but it’s still a nifty line. Despite some clunkers, Dirty Dancing delivers.