Dance With Me (T.S.O.L. Album) - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

According to Blush, "Dance with Me's impact confirms SoCal hardcore as a source of the American goth scene." Bradley Torreano of Allmusic called the album "a phenomenal gothic punk record that paved the way for bands like the Misfits and The Lords of the New Church to make similar music." In a retrospective review, Allmusic's Adam Bregman gave the album four stars out of five, calling it "no mere footnote in punk rock history", "slam pit-inducing, infectious stuff", and "loaded with fine numbers": "Other than the Misfits, no band has combined gothy subject matter and punk rock barre chords as well as T.S.O.L., who hit the nail on the head with this classic 1981 recording." Mike Boehm of the Los Angeles Times included Dance with Me in his list of "Essential Albums, '78–'98", celebrating twenty years of Orange County punk and alternative rock:

Dance with Me had little in common with the T.S.O.L. EP. Its cavalcade of moods and themes was kept on track by the dark authority of the playing. A spooky mood prevails on Dance with Me, underlined by a graveyard scene on the cover. The album inhabits a Halloween fun-house hall of horrors on the title song and "Code Blue", in which Grisham plays a necrophiliac giving a hilarious, if explicit, account of his preferences. It veers toward film noir for the cloak-and-dagger mystery "Triangle" and encompasses earnest accounts of embattled individualism.

In the wake of the 1990s punk rock revival, Dance with Me was re-released in 1996 with slightly altered artwork through Epitaph Records, who had also released albums by Grisham and guitarist Ron Emory's band The Joykiller. Dexter Holland and Greg Kriesel of The Offspring were fans of T.S.O.L., and listened to Dance with Me obsessively when they were getting into punk rock. When The Offspring found major success in 1994, Holland and Kriesel founded their own record label, Nitro Records, re-releasing the T.S.O.L. and Weathered Statues EPs in 1997 as a single compilation. When the original T.S.O.L. lineup reunited in 1999, they signed to Nitro and released the albums Disappear (2001) and Divided We Stand (2003). In 2007 Nitro released a remastered version of Dance with Me with its original artwork.