dead can dance

Aion is wonderful, yes (the perfect soundtrack to walking around the Cloisters on a chilly Autumn afternoon), but there are some truly amazing moments on Into the Labywrinth as well (notably the amazing "Yulunga (Spirit Dance)" and "The Ubiquotous Mr. Lovegrove"). I'm not as familiar with their earlier stuff. I first heard them as participants in This Mortal Coil on It'll End in Tears. I'd say the finest introduction to their music might actually be their live album, Toward the Within, which catches them in all their howling, dulcimer-thwacking glory.

And despite their early sartorial style and misleading name (it actually refers to a drum, not a candaver), DCD should never be lumped in with the Goths. If anything they stray closer to "world music" and....gulp..."new age" than anything else.

what is the best dead can dance record, thank you

after finally hearing them all i decided the self titled one was the best

this is true. doesn't hurt if you get the version with the garden of the arcane delights tracks, either.

"doesn't hurt" being a huge understatement...

Glad you ended up liking the first one so much Jim!! :) I hesitate to recommend that one to newbies only because the production sound is so cluttered/dense. I think "Within The Realm of A Dying Sun" will always be my fave, but I believe we've already done an album poll for them haven't we? Yep, we have.

bimble, which will i like the most? ;)

I wish I knew, Cutty, but thanks for asking. ;) Maybe you could look the band up on You Tube first and go about it that way? I trust you understand that on any given DCD album, there are songs sung by the lady and songs sung by the dude, and they give a different vibe. (By the way, incase there is any remaining doubt, I DO love you for that Cocteau Twins clip you posted that I jizzed over. In fact, it encouraged some soul from Ohio to post some really obscure music to my blog. Can't argue with that.)

DEAD CAN DANCE NEW ALBUM AND TOUR FOR 2012

Unbelievably great news!

!!!!!!!

Not exactly new news though, was first announced over a year ago and has already been mentioned on other DCD/Perry threads.

Wow! Time to start setting aside some cash for plane tickets to go see them play!

Not exactly new news though, was first announced over a year ago and has already been mentioned on other DCD/Perry threads.

yr right, how could anybody have forgotten the maelstrom of press that attended "possible Dead Can Dance reunion in the future at some point" rumors

yr right, how could anybody have forgotten the maelstrom of press that attended "possible Dead Can Dance reunion in the future at some point" rumors

they weren't rumours, Perry made an official announcement in March 2010 about a new DCD album and tour in 2012

i found an old CD of Dead Can Dance...into the labrynth, it was my wifes and i never really listened to them

but it's kind of amazing how their style really became so influential in movie and video game music

like esp the sort of "world music" female vox and percussion in a dramatic setting, like if you are spelunking tomb or something

Flashback to goth/rivethead/incipient programmers in the early 1990s mainlining those CDs as they pull all night sessions with their SLIP connections and I think the explanation is clear.

but it's kind of amazing how their style really became so influential in movie and video game music

yeah this is otm

think it was Baraka that really sealed their position in this field, it was very influential at the time

new album is good news as long as it's better than fucking Spiritchaser

much love for DCD otherwise!

what a great band

lisa gerrard did a bunch of film music though so it's not that surprising.

I was gonna say, it's probably her that you hear on those soundtracks/ videogames.

imo a lot of her solo work is as good as/better than a lot of dcd

brendan perry's last album was pretty fantastic

Flashback to goth/rivethead/incipient programmers in the early 1990s mainlining those CDs as they pull all night sessions with their SLIP connections and I think the explanation is clear.

im listening to dead can dance and hacking in emacs, as if from another time

based upon the two albums ive spent time with (serpent's egg and aion), these are the two songs i feel like illustrate the yin and yang of the duo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B35SMfHN5f8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQunZ0ReAu4

The perfect union:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do5vj3D-OD4

that track still sends shivers down my spine.

wow.. stunning

http://deadcandance.com/

New album out August 9th.

http://www.directcurrentmusic.com/dc-music-news-feed/2012/5/7/dead-can-dance-are-alive-again-for-first-album-since-96.html

I am so incredibly excited about this.

And they're back

Cool, I'd like to see them live again. Although I wasn't particularly taken with the last album.

hahaha, someone's been reading Jarcke and Murray uncritically. Still v. excited to hear the new album!

I thought the tour title sounded a bit final.

oh, it's the tour name, I initially read it as another compilation.

I did the same - it was only when I checked the track titles that I realised I was mistaken.

uhh $34 shipping?

well, if it weighs over 2 pounds, it would cost about $30 to ship from US -> UK, dunno about vice-versa

In one review of Anastasis that I saw, the author wondered if Perry and Gerrard were even ever in the same room together while making the album. I hadn’t thought of that, but their modern ability to just send audio files to each other across the world does mean a different kind of collaboration than on the earlier albums, and maybe the flaws of that album derive in large part due to that.

That's ironic, because when I saw them on the last go-round they might as well have been in different rooms – they didn't interact onstage at all and the atmosphere was distinctly frosty.

first track that's out there for some people (on Youtube) is "The Mountain" but not for me. "This video contains content from (Merlin) PIAS, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

it's a nice folksy bagpipe type thing with Brendan doing some invented language and Lisa a bit of mystère des voix Bulgares and there are goat sounds during the outro

Might have posted elsewhere: she appears on the new Mystere des Voix Bulgares album.

"The Mountain" is on their website, btw.

Meh. *shrugs*

I’m liking it.
Mourning the loss of familiar DCD tropes (eg vocals), but as it is, it’s 1,000,000x better than Anastasis which is the only useless album by them for me.

I’m going to start playing it back to back (side 1 for side 1 etc) with Jon Hassell’s new Listening to Pictures - I find these two albums curiously related.

No vocals?

v skeptical about a no-vox DCD

There are vocals on the (only) track on the website.

no.
there are Brendan and Lisa vocals, but on the second part only. in total, on about three out of seven tracks (that's including the preview track on the website).
the rest of the vocals are samples of singing voices from various sources.
the vocals are all lyric-less (à la Spiritchaser) and more Brendan than Lisa.

to continue the connection with Jon Hassell's work, curiously enough the album starts more or less just like Hassell's Earthquake Island does.

it's ok. might grow on me. There are vocals but yes, no 'words'. It's a bit of a strange album for them to have done, IMO. I'll be thrilled to see them live again if they tour the US; I can't say this is my favorite album of theirs, but I haven't really loved anything after Toward the Within. I really like Perry's solo albums.

if they wanna release a string of experimental half-hour long albums that are all over the place, I'm on board... I'll get 'em all (although I won't be spending $50 on the deluxe editions).

that would be cool but I suspect it'll be another 6 years before another album comes out

Probably! Perry takes his time, but Gerrard is pretty prolific. Always collaborating with someone and releasing new stuff... I bet they could do another album in a year or two if they wanted.

i'm enjoying this new album a lot but i think the best DCD related-thing of recent years is probably this Brendan Perry solo joint

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rTFsWzXyl0

! ^ this is more DCD than the last two DCD albums (it even has that dulcimer thing I thought she played?)

So I've been listening to Dionysus all weekend... it's true that Lisa Gerrard's presence on the album is minimal. It kinda sounds like Perry doing a remix of Spiritchaser, you get the sense that Gerrard kinda shipped over some vocal samples that he worked into the entire piece. There's not really a track where she takes the vocal lead a la Cantara, Yulunga, or the Love That Cannot Be.

I'm really digging it, but it is by far the most left-field thing they've ever released.

And I should amend my statement to say Gerrard's vocal presence is minimal. They seem to have spent a couple years researching the subject of this record (Dionysus), and I would guess Gerrard was a part of that if they're calling it a Dead Can Dance record. Hoping there'll be an interview with them where they talk about how they conceived of and recorded this.

Mixed feelings so far. On the one hand, it really taps into a very specific DCD sound: it reminds me of their brief "jungle" phase after 'Aion' (eg the new songs on the 'Passage in Time' comp). On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if their work on movie soundtracks hasn't sanitized some of this music. Some of it feels a bit bland "exotic" incidental music.

It does have the quality of a IMAX movie soundtrack... so aggressively naturalistic yet sharp, so your brain feels like a cat that's been petted too much and lashes out

So weird, I'm in the middle of watching the 'Spaceship Earth' documentary about Biosphere 2 and there's a shot of them laying around in a rec area, splayed on the floor listening to The Fatal Impact :)

tour is cancelled for unspecified "health reasons". bummer.

Lisa said in a recent interview that they were finished for good, leading to large amounts of exasperated and angry people on FB spouting off like babies. But what can you do.

would have liked to see them live one more time, but this can hardly be a surprise... she was barely even on the last album

yeah the last two albums and tours seemed like a cash grab tbh, you could tell their hearts weren't in it.

she seemed to be attributing the end to health problems on brendan's part. not sure if he has long covid or some other issues. that said, I'm glad I saw their last tour, was looking forward to this one kind of, but I'm not heartbroken they've called it a day. I don't care much for the last two records either.

Peter Ulrich's book about his time in DcD is great, lotsa detail about the early days.

been wondering if that's any good!