Outside of the Brooklyn experimental pop duo Water From Your Eyes, Nate Amos has been making music on his own as This Is Lorelei and put out his first proper album under that name last year, Box for Buddy, Box for Star. One highlight from that album is the sparkly “Dancing in the Club,” a hangdog’s lament that becomes a long, honest look in the mirror. “And I know it’s only cards/But love I feel your heart in spades,” Amos sings in a wobbly Auto-Tune over sparkly mirrorball synths. Alongside a hypnotic guitar loop, he unwinds a downward spiral of self-sabotage that concludes with him going for broke: “While you were dancing in the club/I gave my diamonds all away.”
The quiet devastation of “Dancing in the Club” is illuminated by MJ Lenderman. If Amos’ Auto-Tune kept shame and desperation at a slight distance on the distorted original, Lenderman’s nasally deadpan allows these feelings to bruise in new shades. He sounds right at home delivering Amos’ earnest angst—“And I fucked up my guitar/While I was fucking up my heart”—and his lackadaisical drawl draws out the loneliness of a disintegrating relationship: “And I took my lover’s call/I flew those numbers through the air/And I told me not to care/That I was feeling all alone there.” Accepting that something is lost is a hard lesson but to quote a Lenderman original, “We all got work to do.” “Dancing in the Club”’s self-confessed loser knows that it’s time to take the L.
