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Rating: Twenty years to finally meet them.
On the previous tour, the news, alas, reached my ears too late, when it was already impossible to get any ticket. Not so this time: as soon as I heard about the event, I marked the date on the calendar, waiting with anticipation for the day the tickets would go on sale. Result: front row with both honors and burdens (twenty years of waiting more than justify spending a few extra euros). A ticket bought blindly: only in August would the new album of the Australian duo be heard. So, when I found myself listening to the new songs, I began to imagine what kind of concert I could expect.
“Anastasis,” I admit, on first listening, seemed a bit too conventional to me. An excellent convention, mind you, but perhaps missing something. With subsequent listens, the album grew on me. I learned to listen and appreciate this new guise of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry. Maybe something was missing, yes, but that something had already been lost many years ago: the passion, the tension that belonged to the early Dead Can Dance could no longer exist. Rightfully so. They have grown, changed, and matured, and their music today is this above all: mature and aware; their ability to produce excellent music remains unchanged, perhaps more accessible to everyone today, but no less valid for that. The real misstep of the Australian duo, in my opinion, was “Spiritchaser,” which was all too easy, or rather “crowd-pleasing,” certainly not “Anastasis.”
And it was with this awareness that I traveled from Naples to Milan, to the Teatro degli Arcimboldi for my “Fatal impact.” It was wonderful to see, even before the concert started, people of all ages, predominantly dressed in black, smiling and visibly excited, and so I must have appeared from the outside, even though I was wearing a multicolored shirt. And all these people were a fundamental component of the concert: religiously silent throughout the duration of every single song (except for some small buzz when a more dated piece was recognized), ready to burst into enthusiastic applause at the end of each performance.
The acoustics, in my opinion, were good, except for some distortion on the bass, but promptly corrected: the first bass drum hit of “Children of the Sun” right at the beginning of the concert seriously made me fear for my eardrums’ endurance, but luckily the danger was quickly neutralized.
The setlist naturally favored the latest work, which bothered some of the attendees: but this was predictable as it was the ‘Anastasis’ tour. Of course, I, too, would have liked to hear many other songs, but probably four hours wouldn't have been enough to satisfy all those present, and, on the other hand, the Dead Can Dance are these today, even the older pieces have been bent to this state of things, and it is a process already started with “Toward the Within”: think of the difference between the version of “Cantara” contained in the live album (beautiful, nothing to object) and the decidedly more gothic one present in “Within the Realm of a Dying Sun.”
Personally, I wouldn’t have particularly missed “Nierika” or, especially, “Now We Are Free,” but the presence of some gems forgave everything, especially the very intense “Dreams Made Flesh,” for me, the emotional peak of the concert alongside Perry’s version of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” although I would have much preferred to hear it arpeggiated on his 12-string.
“The Host of Seraphim” surprised me, one of my favorite songs from their repertoire: hearing it sung in a different key disoriented me, leaving me wondering if it was a choice dictated by Gerrard's vocal needs or the desire to harmonize her voice with Perry’s, much more present in this live version. The result left me perplexed and made the piece I anticipated the most not engage me too much. Instead, it was pleasant to observe how, at the end of each song, she turned towards him with a smile, perhaps a sign of a newly found harmony, which may herald further musical developments in the duo’s discography.
Ultimately, a very satisfying concert, elegant and emotional at the same time. If I had to describe it in one word: beautiful. So much so that, today, after two weeks have passed, I would be willing to do it all over again (considerable expenses, long journey) to relive the same sensations. Those very sensations, which after many days, pushed me to write this review to share and somehow fix in time those moments, and if I have gone on at length, I apologize, it’s been twenty years that I wanted to tell it.
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