Friday , March 29 2024

Dead Can Dance (but they fall down a lot)

Some of the most indelible music of the ’80s was made by Dead Can Dance, a rotating phalanx of players around singer/songwriters Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard incorporating medieval, gothic, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and various other ancient and sacred musical influences into songs and tone poems with mythic titles like “The Host of Seraphim,” “Song of Sophia,” “Cantara” and “De Profundis.”

While in description all of this screams of pretension, in practice these disparate elements are bound together into a captivating – and at times awe-inspiring – sonic composite of much greater breadth and devotion than similarly-inspired new age piffle.

Dead Can Dance honors both the spiritual and aesthetic aspects of these musics. John Rivers’ luxuriant production creates distinct atmospheres for each piece, and the albums he worked on – Spleen and Ideal, Within the Realm of a Dying Sun, The Serpent’s Egg – are the group’s most profound and affecting.

The Rhino box set is an excellent representation of the band’s entire career, but they were most deep in the mid- and late-’80s.

About Eric Olsen

Career media professional and serial entrepreneur Eric Olsen flung himself into the paranormal world in 2012, creating the America's Most Haunted brand and co-authoring the award-winning America's Most Haunted book, published by Berkley/Penguin in Sept, 2014. Olsen is co-host of the nationally syndicated broadcast and Internet radio talk show After Hours AM; his entertaining and informative America's Most Haunted website and social media outlets are must-reads: Twitter@amhaunted, Facebook.com/amhaunted, Pinterest America's Most Haunted. Olsen is also guitarist/singer for popular and wildly eclectic Cleveland cover band The Props.

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