Dead Can Dance
Spleen and Ideal

THE REVIEW

Solemn and mystical ceremonial, "Spleen and Ideal" presents itself as the ideal boundary between popular music and medieval religious chant. The Anglo-Australian duo composed of Brendan Perry and the gentle Lisa Gerrard prides themselves this time on classical instruments including percussion, winds, and strings; this will be fundamental in the album's timbre, which, very much like a somber mass, plunges the listener into emotional abysses and crises of faith. The relentless timpani beats in  "De Profundis", accompanied by a liturgical organ, elevate Gerrard's exotic chant here, aided by desperate choirs in the background. The sacred aura will never leave this work, evoking scents of incense, and whose only brightness is the humble candle flaming in a dark cathedral. "Ascension" represents an act of humility, where only some choirs paired with the organ represent a contact with the reality of prayer. The malevolent onset of "Circumradiant Dawn" insinuates evil into the work, and Lisa Gerrard's singing here is extraordinarily both redeeming and tempting in its emanations. The arrangements are sublime, an unsurpassable peak in the genre (even the Cocteau Twins with the masterpiece "Head Over Heels" will not reach such depths). Brendan Perry, so far more in the shadows, paints a rhythmic and fatalistic "Cardinal Sin", perhaps the most earthly track of the entire set, yet fantastically touching with trumpets and bass in the foreground, and featuring an extraordinary verse:

"Fools are often loathe to testify
It's an illusion of life
The whole cause of our demise
It's an illusion of life"

Here begins the most incredible part of the work; first of all, the absolute masterpiece "Mesmerism". Gerrard sings one of the most intense arias of her career, a witchcraft-like alluring, hypnotic, supernatural spell, over a backdrop of tribal percussion and strings building an unbearable and wonderful emotional tension. Arabic imagery and black magic merge into an onyx of shining darkness. And after sin, comes redemption, the celestial, the ethereal: "Enigma of the Absolute" sees Perry once again in the role of savior, one who tears a hole in the darkness. His vocal opening, powerful and divine, weaves a choir for angels with a cello that opens with a guitar arpeggio and culminates in words of biblical scent:

"Across the sea lies the fountain of renewal
Where you will see the whole cause of your lonliness
Can be measured in dreams that transcend all these lies
And I wish and I pray that there may come a day
For a saviour's arms?"

With "Advent" however, one falls back into a claustrophobic nightmare of tight beats and gloomy organ phrases. It is Brendan Perry himself who betrays the listener with a tone that is open, yet terribly resigned ("In the hour of darkness, Our worlds collide, Assailed by madness, That has plagued our lives"), soon joined by Lisa Gerrard's otherworldly choirs. It is the prelude to the hopeless "Avatar" where Lisa once again takes command in the most touching aria of the album, with an unusually desperate attitude. The laments try not to sink into a sea of reverberations, the voice trembles with pain and mystical hallucination in a crescendo that inexorably fades, leaving the listener in a lake of dead tears in the throat. The sad epitaph of "Indoctrination" now lives on in regret and includes the most significant lyric of the work, closing this journey into the darkest recesses of faith with a sort of sermon:

"How can you be satisfied with things the way they are
When all that surrounds us now and so much more
Remains inside the keeper's dark embrace?
The insatiable thirst for power has made
Idols out of mortals, gods into clay
Soldiers into heros, children into slaves
All damned
Desires
Their hopes betrayed?"