dead can dance

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!