| Dead Can Dance | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | 27 February 1984 | |||
| Recorded | 1983 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 35:01 (original) 51:06 (re-release) | |||
| Label | 4AD | |||
| Producer | Dead Can Dance | |||
| Dead Can Dance chronology | ||||
| ||||
Dead Can Dance is the eponymous debut studio album by Dead Can Dance, as released on 27 February 1984 on the 4AD label.
The album was recorded at Blackwing Studios in London. The musicians include Brendan Perry, Lisa Gerrard, Paul Erikson, James Pinker and Peter Ulrich. The instrumentation consisted of guitars, bass guitar and drums, with added percussion and the very distinct sound of the yangqin, as played by Gerrard. [ citation needed ]
Initially scheduled for two weeks in the studio, the band eventually appealed to 4AD label head Ivo Watts-Russell for an additional week. [1] Perry recalled that the time constraints, as well as friction with engineer John Fryer, made the experience less than ideal:
We hadn't been gigging a lot. We'd only done like two or three live shows, and so we weren't well rehearsed going into it...also, we didn't get on with [Fryer] at all...but we managed to get it done in the end, swamped with reverb...we really didn't capture our live sound at all, it sounds overprocessed and kind of thin-sounding to my ears. [1]
AllMusic commented on the album's sound: "Bearing much more resemblance to the similarly gripping, dark early work of bands like the Cocteau Twins and the Cure than to the later fusions of music that would come to characterize the duo's sound, Dead Can Dance is as goth as it gets in many places". [2]
The album cover consists of a photo of a piece of artwork from Papua New Guinea on the left side, [3] and on the right, the Greek characters "ΔΞΛΔ CΛΝ ΔΛΝCΞ", which aimed to visually resemble the title "DEAD CAN DANCE".
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   [2] |
The album was released by 4AD on 27 February 1984. Some editions included Dead Can Dance's next release, the EP Garden of the Arcane Delights , added onto the end of the album. In a retrospective review, AllMusic wrote that, with the album, "Perry and Gerrard created a striking, dour landmark in early-'80s atmospherics". [2]
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "The Fatal Impact" | 3:21 |
| 2. | "The Trial" | 3:42 |
| 3. | "Frontier" | 3:13 |
| 4. | "Fortune" | 3:47 |
| 5. | "Ocean" | 3:21 |
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "East of Eden" | 3:23 |
| 2. | "Threshold" | 3:34 |
| 3. | "A Passage in Time" | 4:03 |
| 4. | "Wild in the Woods" | 3:46 |
| 5. | "Musica Eternal" | 3:51 |
| Country | Date |
|---|---|
| Australia | 27 February 1984 |
| United States | 22 March 1994 |
Personnel adapted from Dead Can Dance liner notes. [4]
