The Last Dance is the fourth EP and seventh overall release by English post-rock and experimental rock band Disco Inferno.

The EP was mostly overlooked upon its release but has subsequently been praised, alongside the rest of the band's output in this era, to be highly innovative.

[2] The band "hit upon a seemingly simple but ultimately world-opening idea" with the EP: to write their instruments through samplers, and unlike their contemporaries who sampled elements of music, film dialogue or other media, Disco Inferno "engaged with the whole world", using their set up to record sounds ranging from running water, the wind, whistling birds, boots, car crashes and angry voices.

According to Andy Kellman of Allmusic, the new label "saved the band's life, as the members believed that they were too challenging for anyone else to understand or care for.

[5] Paul Wilmott recalled that he initially felt that working with Johnson "was a betrayal to Charlie",[4] whilst Ian Crause commented that "it did feel strange," adding that he thought McIntosh "was a bit hurt, but our manager rallied us, and we did it.

"[4] In retrospect, Johnson commented that he always found working with bands inspired by Joy Division and New Order to be a positive thing, saying "it meant they were open to my ideas and weren't suspicious or too wary about my methods and suggestions.

[5] According to Ned Raggett of Pitchfork Media, "The Last Dance was in many ways a profound change from the group's previous releases" and ranges "from the serene sonic calm" of "Scattered Showers" to the "extreme frenzy" of "D.I.

Music journalist Tom Ewing called it "the least formally groundbreaking of DI’s records," but noted that "the moment [he] heard it I was floored by its originality and sense of purpose.

[8] Nonetheless, Ewing stated that "The Last Dance" is also the band's "wisest, most moving song, a meditation on history, on the impossibility of making something new in art and on the need to try and do so anyhow.

It’s also their most musically endearing, a tune as taut and poignant as anything Wire ever recorded, with delicate guitar lines meshing and weaving, always pretty but always understated.

Crause's voice sounds just alien enough with subtle distortion -- the samples he triggers with his guitar -- rather than the lovely, echoed chiming itself -- help carry the song.

"[6] Nick Southall of Stylus Magazine called the song "straight-ahead post-punk pop music but re-imagined and reconstructed with added detail taken from the world outside.

Go Pop" was "essentially put together like a garage band" and consists of a second-long sample of the My Bloody Valentine song "You Made Me Realise", taken from the band's 1988 EP of the same name, pitched across Crause's guitar "with the unpredictable fret release firing off samples at a much higher pitch by chance," giving it an even more chaotic feel.

[4] Raggett described the song, saying "after a pleasant radio announcer sample, an incredibly messed-up loop of sound -- the band is in it somewhere, but not as much as all the other strange noises and notes crammed into the music -- serves as the bed for a perversely simple but completely uneasy listening melody.

I can't remember the exact lyrics, but we were starting to laugh between ourselves about our lack of success and I was also beginning to increasingly think of us as a cartoon band to reflect our total hopelessness, which I got from Paul, who was the chief giggler.

[7] Andrew Unterberger of Stylus Magazine said the sound of the song "is something like a Buzzcocks single whose RPM can’t seem to remain steady, constantly spinning faster and slowing down again.

Like Gartside, Ian Crause is adept at finding the critical core of the matter, capturing the minutiae of the political moment, and then panning out to paint the overarching meta-concerns of the day.

Sung/spoken with Crause’s disaffected voice, submerged in the hurricanes of sampler detritus the group assembled around their songs, they make for pithy observation amongst a generation more interested in staring at their shoes.

The idea for the song came about because the band had extra studio time booked, and Johnson "wanted to play around" with the title track in a similar style to how he approached the remixes he had previously produced for New Order.

"[10] "Scattered Showers" closes the EP and was the band's first ever track that was put together with Wilmott doing the majority of the sampling featured on an Akai S3200.

: Disco Inferno should have mattered more than anyone, but their curse was to turn up at a time when exploring the frontiers of pop – especially using songs – simply wasn’t fashionable any more.

According to Matthew Olmos of The 405, for many years afterwards, "most modern fans have been passing around increasingly shitty mp3s sourced from a single bootleg CD-R rip of the original vinyl releases [of the EPs].

Ned Raggett of Allmusic reviewed the EP later on in the 1990s, rating it four stars out of five, saying it "captured the band perfecting the low-key, crisp sound that characterized their more accessible numbers and their total, uncompromising extremism", and after praising the title track, "The Long Dance" and "Scattered Showers," noted that "the jaw-dropper is "D. I.

"[6] However, in a 2014 article for Pitchfork Media, Raggett said that the "centrepiece is the title song itself, showcasing the band both at its most tensely propulsive and, thanks to a powerful lyric on the oppressive weight of political and cultural history, its most cutting and observational.

"[15] Writing for Freaky Trigger in 1999, music journalist Tom Ewing placed "The Last Dance" at number 2 on his list of the "Top 100 Singles of the 90s,"[8] saying although it is "the least formally groundbreaking of DI’s records," it is "also their wisest, most moving song, a meditation on history, on the impossibility of making something new in art and on the need to try and do so anyhow.

It’s also their most musically endearing, a tune as taut and poignant as anything Wire ever recorded, with delicate guitar lines meshing and weaving, always pretty but always understated.

"[8] He further commented: In 1993, making the most radical guitar music in the world, Ian Crause probably didn’t think he was singing about the years ahead and what they would do to pop, but in a way he was: "The noise of the past builds up into a crescendo / And the waves of rubbish…are amplified a million times or more" Too right: no matter how many lists you list or polls you poll, now matter how often you talk up reheated mediocrities or chuck superlatives around, you won’t convince me that an era where bands as dull as Oasis became multi-millionaires and a band as special as Disco Inferno collapsed un-noticed was anything other than an era where things went catastrophically wrong.

Crause spits out his lyrics amidst a woozy cacophony akin to a Walkman warping and unspooling, to create a truly exhilarating rollercoaster ride.

"[19] Jon Dale of Dusted Magazine regarded the title track to be "Disco Inferno at their most wide-eyed and populist, like New Order taking a crash course in Marx.

Go Pop" as being "made like mutated strains of C86 that, instead of bursting out into a controlled mushroom cloud, reached critical mass and became black-holes, devouring anything nearby.