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| Dead Can Dance | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 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 | ||||
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Dead Can Dance is the debut studio album by Australian musical act Dead Can Dance. It was released on 27 February 1984 on the 4AD label.
Dead Can Dance commented on their official website regarding the name of the band and album:
To understand why we chose the name, think of the transformation of inanimacy to animacy. Think of the processes concerning life from death and death into life. So many people missed the inherent symbolic intention of the work, and assumed that we must be "morbid gothic types".
The album was recorded at Blackwing Studios.
The musicians who performed on the album were 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.
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 includes 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".
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.
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   [2] |
In its retrospective review, AllMusic wrote that, with the album, "Perry and Gerrard created a striking, dour landmark in early-'80s atmospherics". [2]
The band's touring was limited to Europe during this period. [4]
| 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. [5]
Dead Can Dance are an Australian neoclassical darkwave band from Melbourne. Currently composed of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, the group formed in 1981. They relocated to London the following year. Australian music historian Ian McFarlane described Dead Can Dance's style as "constructed soundscapes of mesmerising grandeur and solemn beauty; African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant, Middle Eastern music, mantras, and art rock."
Lisa Germaine Gerrard is an Australian musician, singer and composer and member of the music group Dead Can Dance with music partner Brendan Perry. She is known for her unique singing style technique (glossolalia). She has a dramatic contralto voice and has a vocal range of three octaves.
Spleen and Ideal is the second studio album by Australian band Dead Can Dance. It was released on 25 November 1985 by 4AD. The album spearheaded the group's sonic transition from their post-punk and gothic rock-influenced roots towards a neoclassical dark wave style.
Within the Realm of a Dying Sun is the third studio album by Australian band Dead Can Dance. It was released on 27 July 1987 by 4AD.
The Serpent's Egg is the fourth studio album by the Australian band Dead Can Dance, released on 24 October 1988 by record label 4AD.
Brendan Michael Perry is a British singer and multi-instrumentalist best known for his work as half of the duo Dead Can Dance with Lisa Gerrard.
Toward the Within is the first live album by Australian band Dead Can Dance, released on 24 October 1994 by 4AD. It contains 15 songs, of which only four appeared on their previous albums, and two of which were later re-recorded and included on Lisa Gerrard's first solo album, The Mirror Pool. The others previously existed only in live performances and unofficial bootlegs, but were not officially released until Toward the Within. Along with Perry and Gerrard were a number of musicians who had performed with them on other occasions.
It'll End in Tears is the first album released by 4AD collective This Mortal Coil, an umbrella title for a loose grouping of guest musicians and vocalists brought together by label boss Ivo Watts-Russell. The album was released on 1 October 1984, and reached #38 on the UK Albums Chart. It features many of the artists on the 4AD roster at the time, including Cocteau Twins, Colourbox, and Dead Can Dance; as well as key post-punk figure Howard Devoto, who sang "Holocaust", one of two covers of songs from the Third/Sister Lovers album by Big Star. The other Alex Chilton-penned track, album opener "Kangaroo", was released as a single to promote the album. Two key songs were performed by Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, including Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren", which reached #66 on the UK Charts when released as This Mortal Coil's debut single a year before the album. The song remained on the UK Indie Chart for almost two years. Fraser also performed on "Another Day" by Roy Harper. 4AD would go on to release two further albums under the name of This Mortal Coil: Filigree & Shadow (1986) and Blood (1991).
Spiritchaser is the seventh studio album by Dead Can Dance, and would prove to be the last before the duo reunited fourteen years later for Anastasis. It expands on its exploration of world music, and like Into the Labyrinth, was recorded at Quivvy Church, Brendan Perry's personal studio in Ireland.
Into the Labyrinth is the sixth studio album by Australian band Dead Can Dance, released on 13 September 1993, by 4AD. It marked a strong shift from their previous albums, putting ethnic music influences at the forefront, as would be the case in the later albums. It was their first album completed on their own without the aid of guest musicians, and their first album to have a major-label release in the US, thanks to a distribution deal that 4AD had with Warner Bros. Records. It featured the single "The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove". Into the Labyrinth was a major success, selling more than 500,000 copies worldwide.
Dead Can Dance (1981–1998) (2001) is a four-disc box set, containing three CDs of music spanning Dead Can Dance's career and a DVD of their 1994 video release Toward the Within.
Garden of the Arcane Delights is the first EP by Australian band Dead Can Dance. It was released in August 1984 on record label 4AD. The tracks were later added to Dead Can Dance's self-titled debut album when it was re-released on CD.
Ethereal wave, also called ethereal darkwave, ethereal goth or simply ethereal, is a subgenre of dark wave music that is variously described as "gothic", "romantic", and "otherworldly". Developed in the early 1980s in the UK as an outgrowth of gothic rock, ethereal wave was mainly represented by 4AD bands such as Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and early guitar-driven Dead Can Dance.
Aion is the fifth studio album by the Australian band Dead Can Dance, released on 11 June 1990 by 4AD. The first album Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry wrote after the end of their romantic partnership, it was recorded at Perry's new estate, Quivvy Church in Ireland, with additional recording on "The Arrival and the Reunion" and "The End of Words" taking place at Woodbine Street Recording Studios in Leamington Spa.
Pieter Bourke is an Australian musician, composer, producer and audio engineer. From 1995 he has recorded several projects with Dead Can Dance founder Lisa Gerrard, and was a touring member of Dead Can Dance's 1996 Spiritchaser Tour. On 14 April 1998 Bourke and Gerrard issued a world music album, Duality. From 1993 he also collaborated with industrial musician, David Thrussell, first as part of the latter's band Snog, then together as the ambient duo, Soma. In 2001, he formed a dub reggae outfit, Secret Masters, with Brian Westbrook. Bourke and Gerrard have received two shared Golden Globe nominations for 'Best Original Score', in 2000 for The Insider (1999), and in 2002 for Ali (2001).
Eye of the Hunter is the debut solo album by Brendan Perry, previously the male half of the band Dead Can Dance. The album was released by 4AD on 4 October 1999 in the UK and a day later in the US.
Dead Can Dance is an ambient, world music band which has released nine studio albums so far, two live albums, four compilation albums, one video album, one extended play and nine singles. The band formed in Melbourne, Australia in 1981 but relocated to London, United Kingdom in 1982 and signed with 4AD Records where they disbanded in 1998.
Peter Lawrence Ulrich is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, recording artist and author.
Anastasis is a 2012 studio album by the British-Australian band Dead Can Dance. It is the eighth studio album by the band and the first after Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard disbanded in 1998. It was officially released on 13 August 2012 by PIAS Recordings, 16 years after the group's last album, Spiritchaser. It is also the band's first album since it left 4AD. "Anastasis" is the Greek word for "resurrection".
Garden of the Arcane Delights + The John Peel Sessions is a compilation coupling the re-issue of the first and only EP by Australian band Dead Can Dance and two different sessions for the BBC Radio One John Peel show. It was released in November 2016 on record label 4AD with the Peel-supervised recordings allowed by arrangement with BBC Music.
