Dance With The Dead releases new album

3/3/2016, 5:00 p.m.
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The Shape is Orange County, CA based duo, Dance With The Dead (DWTD), newest full length album.  This is their third record and their fifth release.  Two EP’s snuck in between the trio of full albums.  Released in early February 2016, The Shape features their signature blend of high fidelity programed synths, drum beats and raging guitar. It is a sonic playground for your ear drum.  DWTD consists of Justin Pointer and Tony Kim.

We caught up with Justin to talk about the new album.

I’ve never studied music formally.  I started out as a drummer and picked up the guitar over the years.  Tony is actually more of the guitar player in DWTD. I do more of the rhythm parts.  When we play shows now, we’re trying to incorporate real creative DJ’ing with a mixture of live guitars.  We’re experimenting and try to create something new.  You know, we want to create a show!  We don’t want to be just two dudes standing behind laptops.  We just imagine ourselves out in the crowd think about what we would want to see…. like a Rob Zombie show, or something like that!  Eventually we are planning on getting to a bunch of theatrics. 

There are many ways to connect with DWTD and the best way to support any band or artist is to… Are you ready?…

BUY THEIR SHIT!

Support:
https://soundcloud.com/dancewiththedead
https://twitter.com/DWTDmusic
https://dancewiththedead.bandcamp.com/

However, with traditional music revenue streams crumbling under the sunlight of internet sharing, DWTD has published a lot of their music online for the fans to enjoy.  We asked Justin about one such channel, NewRetroWave, on Youtube.

We are not affiliated with them.  They just hit us up and asked permission to post some of our material.  They have over a 150K+ subscribers and we were like, ‘Of course! Be our guest’.  It has been some great exposure for us.  The fans of that whole scene are so cool!  There is not a lot snoob’s or snotty people.  You know how some scenes are not open to…. well, you know.  It’s a really cool scene.

DWTD sounds like a 80s synth pop nightmare on horse steroids to us.  However that was never really the sound Justin and Tony have been going for.

As far as an 80’s sound, we’ve never really thought about that at all. I think people have labeled us as that at first because we used a lot of vintage synthesizer sound that was popular in the late 70’s and 80’s.  So, people just kinda’ dubbed us as 80’s.  But when I think of 80’s music, I think of Duran Duran and the Eurythmics. I don’t really see the 80’s stuff in what we do.  Maybe more from the Sci-Fi or horror films, but I guess other people think we’re an 80’s band.  I don’t know. 

Each of DWTD musical projects has a bad ass piece of artwork to go with it. I asked Justin about it.

Tony and I will come up with a concept, but neither of us can draw.  We have a good friend, Rueben Martinez, and we give him the sketches.  He’ll come back with something amazing.  He always nails it.

Most of the guitars on The Shape were recorded with an ESP Viper.  That is one of Tony’s main axes according to Justin.  However, Travis Miguel of the heavy metal band Atrayu, occasionally loans out some of his ESP guitars.  DWTD and Atrayu are tight like that.  However, Justin’s Ibanez Jay Yuenger (White Zombie) signature model was also used extensively on this recording as well.

Catch Dance With The Dead live at the Treefort Music Festival on March 23rd in Boise, ID.