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Rating: Few times have I cried listening to an album, a song; few times have I felt my body vibrate with immense joy and divine pleasure, struck by a sweet orgasm of the senses. I cried when Lou Reed, whose voice usually thunders hard and indifferent, showed the first touching signs of weakness when in "Heroin" he surrendered to the drug with an exasperated and unsettling laugh: I have made a big decision/ I gonna try to nullify my life... It's my wife, it's my life, ah-ah
And you felt like shouting, screaming with all your might: fight, Lou, come on, FIGHT!!! I cried, then, when I first heard "Atrocity Exhibition", when Ian Curtis obsessively and continuously repeated This is the way: step inside, this is the way: step inside...
- and keep in mind that at the time I didn't know the whole story, meaning his tragic end that everyone now knows. I cried, then, when Captain Beefheart in "Trout Mask Replica" indulged in numerous gargles and insane howls, or when Fraser's candid and smirking little voice chirped nonsensical and joyful verses in "Caroline's Fingers", or again when Nico displayed her solemnity and firm voice in "All Tomorrow's Parties".
Finally, I cried when I listened to "The Serpent's Egg", here more than any other.
This is my favorite album by the timeless Dead Can Dance. The real reasons? I don't know, maybe the warm and feverish melodies of Lisa in "The Host of Seraphim or in "The Writing of My Father's Hand" or again in "Orbis de Ignis", where I felt an almost sacred calm, or for Brendan's warm and dreamy voice in the surreal "Severance" or in "Ulyses", a superb ballad. But the true reason is that only here did I feel that shiver, that thrill, that emotion where all the joys of this world burst forth in a giant explosion of light. Beyond this, I can't tell you more, I'm sorry.
I could have also here, as I usually do, thrown a bunch of dates, anecdotes, and coldly examined each song one by one like "This one is beautiful, this one is not, this one is so-so...", but I couldn't, because "The Serpent's Egg" is a single piece, a single celestial work of Art where emotions and sounds intertwine into a single, unified thing. There's nothing else to say, except this: try listening to it and then answer this simple question: did you cry?
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
03 Severance (03:22)
Severance
The birds of leaving call to us
Yet here we stand
Endowed with the fear of flight
Overland
The winds of change consume the land
While we remain
In the shadow of summers now past
When all the leaves
Have fallen and turned to dust
Will we remain
Entrenched within our ways
Indifference
The plague that moves throughout this land
Omen signs
In the shapes of things to come
Tomorrow's child is the only child
10 Ullyses (05:09)
John Francis Dooley
wipe the sleep from your eyes
and embrace the light.
You have slept now
for a thousand years
beneath starless nights.
And now its time for you
to renounce the old ways
and see a new dawn rise.
In former days
the masks were raised
when the god came down
from off the mountain,
and a sacrifice was made
for they knew the day of wrath
was fast apporaching.
Just like yesterday, before the war
John Francis Dooley
the scapegoat has run
all our sins are disowned,
and now it's time for you
to take off thy mask
and cross the Rubicon.
If you and I were one
within the eyes of our designs
it would still not change
the fact of our leaving.
For tonight we must leave
with the first gentle breeze
for the Isles of Ken we are assailing
Just like Ullyses, on an open sea.
On an oddysey of self discovery.
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Other reviews
By Viparita Karani
It is impossible not to be carried away by the powerful emotional wave of this album.
Lisa and Brendan take turns as if to make us feel their separation in each track, much like the beautiful minimalist cover that depicts a river dividing the land but then rejoining in a single magical flow.
