Let's go back, for example, to our opening hypothesis, the one about the primacy of the Here and Now in its most concentrated form, i.e. This Very Moment. If dance music's ideal listening environment is one in which This Very Moment pushes the memory of all previous moments and the imagined occurrences of any future ones off to one side, then what happens when dance music begins to invoke its own past? "Invoke" isn't really even a strong enough word: I think I mean "conjure," or even "imitate." Electro, with its highly aggressive reliance on old beats, old sounds, old things in new light, tickles me a lot, but it often spends most of its time somewhere between the head and the heart. The Junior Boys, on the other hand, make music so achingly raw and emotional that I will be surprised if anything else I hear this year will make me flinch quite so hard.

It complicates matters because I really do respond emotionally to this Junior Boys record, but at the same time, I feel as though this emotional response is as much a reflection of distant previous responses as it is a present-time occurrence. The sounds and the melodies that the Junior Boys make seem calculated not to inspire their own reactions, but to pick up the weight of previous responses and then to increase them. How is it possible for dance music to engage such a trope: to submerge, within its own immediacy, a nostalgia so dense that it ceases to be nostalgia and becomes nostalgia's dew-eyed negative twin, who sulks instead of pining and sits at the bar watching instead of actually heading out to the dance floor?