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Rating: I don't like "best of" collections, especially mixed anthologies. This exception (being so distinguished) proves the rule.
The Dead Can Dance need no introduction, nor would an encyclopedia be enough to outline their artistic profile or summarize their importance. Their career and the gallery of productions that characterize it still remain the most complete example of musical contamination and experimentalism, in the noble (and successful) attempt to bring the contemporary (I would say "pop"ular) perspective closer to the cultured one (or classical, or orchestral, as one prefers), to the ethnic one (or folk), to the oriental one. All this is seasoned with an excellent allusionism, with references to classical and contemporary literature, poetry, and above all, anthropology.
But let's move on to the work (double CD, 26 tracks) under examination, and above all, to the music it contains. The first element that is worth noting, and which perhaps stands out as the only anomaly, is the absence of tracks from the first album, almost as if to disavow its importance and influence (despite being the masterpiece of the "second" dark-wave, more refined and less borrowed from certain post-punk). As for the rest, aside from preferences tied to personal taste, the selection is impeccable, in my opinion.
These are the titles chosen by mutual agreement between Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, composers, performers, and the only members of the band, now unfortunately no longer active:
Disc 1
Frontier
Anywhere Out Of The World
Enigma Of The Absolute
Carnival Of Light
In Power We Entrust The Love Advocated
Summoning Of The Muse
Windfall
In The Kingdom Of The Blind The One-Eyed Are Kings
The Host Of Seraphim
Bird American
Cantara
Severance
Saltarello
Black Sun
Disc 2
Yulunga
The Carnival Is Over
The Lotus Eaters
Rakim
The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove
Sanvean
Song Of The Nile
The Spider's Stratagem
I Can See Now
American Dreaming
Nierika
How Fortunate The Man With None
It is obviously instructional, since all albums (except the first) are represented by at least two tracks, even though masterpieces like "Into The Labyrinth" and "The Serpent's Egg" have more than the others.
During listening, one is therefore surprised by the overlapping and shifting of tones, styles, and musical choices in general, sometimes dark ("In Power We Entrust. . . "), other times more airy and sacred ("The Host Of Seraphim", "Yulunga"), others still joyful and "danceable" ("Saltarello", "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove"), vaguely facetious ("Severance", also performed by Bauhaus), or solemn ("How Fortunate The Man With None", from an immortal poem by B. Brecht).
All of this, needless to say, distinguished by the proverbial technical skill, the well-known taste for exotic instruments, and the equally famous compositional research, which allows Dead Can Dance to move from the shores of ancient and medieval music to folk dances, to true songwriting episodes ("American Dreaming"). However, one should not make easy comparisons with the sometimes sterile eclecticism of World Music, nor with the heterogeneity for its own sake of certain neoclassical and orchestral proposals (stuff like Era, to be clear), what our Australian artists have is the almost perfect union of research and art, with a special focus on "other" music, and therefore (but not only, of course) Arab, Indian, and oriental in general.
Moreover, listening to a work that is majestic in some respects (two hours of music) like this, beyond the immediate pleasure of listening, one also enjoys seeking sometimes arbitrary, and therefore very personal, similarities: echoes of Stravinsky and Tangerine Dream, Cocteau Twins, Bantu tribalism, and De André... A true cauldron, from which everyone, as they please, extracts what they, more or less legitimately, find. More than a simple collection, a basket of delicacies that celebrates a group of seminal importance.
Recommended particularly to those who don't know Dead Can Dance, but think that music is not just a slavish succession of the same guitar strumming or the hypnotic pounding of a synthesizer in a disco; even if, after all, even the dead can dance...
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
03 Enigma of the Absolute (04:14)
Saloman hung down her head, laid bare her heart
For the world to see; she craved for intimacy
Through darkened doors her aspect veiled with indecision
Gazed out to see; she craved lucidity
Cast adrift from past relationships in her life
Hoisted up the ideal, this was her saving grace
Seas of rage that once assailed her concern for the truth
Had passed her by and left her high and dry
In her savior's arms
In her savior's arms
In her savior's arms
In her savior's arms
Across the sea lies the fountain of renewal
Where you will see the whole cause of your loneliness
Can be measured in dreams that transcend all these lies
And I wish, and I pray that there may come a day
For a savior's arms
For a savior's arms
For a savior's arms
For a savior's arms
05 In Power We Entrust the Love Advocated (04:10)
Sail on silver wings
through this storm
What fortune love may bring
Back to my arms again
The love of a former golden age.
I am disabled by fears concerning which course to take.
For, now that wheels are turning,
I find my faith deserting me...
This night is filled with cries of
Dispossesed children in search of Paradise.
A sign of unresolve that,
Envisioned, drives the pinwheel on-and-on.
I am disabled by fears concerning which course to take.
When memory bears witness to
The innocence, consumed in dying rage!
The way lies through our love;
There can be no other means to the end,
Or keys to my heart...
You will never find.
You will never find!
12 Severance (03:21)
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
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