Dead Can Dance ‎– Dead Can Dance

Perfection. Sounds amazing. Deep, warm and powerful. Don’t hesitate to buy it

I love this album. I bought it and the Arcane Delights EP on vinyl when they first came out. They were a beautiful surprise, seemingly from ‘some other place’ (like every 4AD release at that time); it was a stunning display of brilliance, unique. The music obviously draws from other references (as music always does), but making their own DCD sound. Dead Can Dance collect, study and use instruments from all over the world and have proven to draw from many musical movements throughout history - medieval, oriental, African, Irish . . . fantastic string instruments and fantastic drums with clear beats, some thudding others more tunefully echoey. A seeming timeless quality pervades the music because of its breadth of sources and immaculate production, and of course the artists' dedication to music.

Brendan and Lisa take turn providing vocals – that presence of strong, male and female solo voices add to a kind of yin yang, universal identity as they deal with themes at once worldly and mystical (bla bla bla, yes, I know . . .). With every album (including the current ones) DCD 'improved' in terms of their musicianship creating an increasingly eclectic soundscape of awe laden music.

It would be easy to come to Dead Can Dances’ music during their later, more polished albums (the exalting track, “Sanvean”) and hence dismiss the first album and EP. But this album ( + EP ) is primal in more ways than just literally: there is an unrepeatable beauty to the rawness in these first pieces. I suppose also it is a kind of personal album to me. I bought it when it came out, it was fresh and new (in its nod to the ancient!) and I had no idea what subsequent DCD albums would be like. This first album and 4 x track EP introduce DCD as a kind of Grecian paean to music, representing the continuing rebirth of music, indeed reappraising music out of the ashes of punk. (In Australia, Brendan and Lisa used to go to Nick Cave concerts as the Birthday Party. This divergent taste states a lot.)

DCD conjures oceans, winds, landscapes, all life’s creatures, humanity and human emotions: pain (Lisa Gerrard’s “Sacrifice”) and joy . . . “Frontier” was exactly that, a kind of border, through which DCD broke and then produced more music. This first album isn’t as immediately beautiful as the subsequent albums, but it is the album from which all the other albums then emerged. I’m really glad I heard the DCD albums chronologically.