Dead Can Dance

I think I can say, with some certainty, that you have never heard of Dead Can Dance. Well, I’m going to set about the, seemingly, impossible task of explaining who and what they are. Dead Can Dance was formed by two Australians, Lisa Gerard, and Brendan Perry. I found Dead Can Dance the summer of ’06. I was on my way to a cottage with my girlfriend, at the time, when she told me to put it in the CD player. She said it would be perfect traveling music and she was 100% correct. Dead Can Dance is a band that defies classification. Sometimes they may sound Celtic, sometimes they Persian, sometimes it’s Gothic, in the classical sense of the term, and sometimes you’d think they were a gypsy band. And that’s all just on one album. While you would think this shifting from one sound to another would, ultimately, result in a cluttered mess of an album, Dead Can Dance make it all effortlessly mesh together. Their earlier work, like the their self-titled fist album, were very much goth sounding (in terms of how we use it today.) They sounded like they could open for the Cure, or even having the Cure open for them. As the years went by they evolved and grew and became much more sonically diverse. While they have 9 studio albums they also have a myriad of live albums. The 9 albums they released together as Dead Can Dance were; Dead Can Dance, Spleen and Ideal, Within the Realm of a Dying Sun, The Serpent's Egg, Aion, A Passage in Time, Into the Labyrinth, Toward the Within, and Spiritchaser. While their breakup wasn't offical until 1998, their last album together as Dead Can Dance was released in 1996. Lisa went on to record a number of solo and collaborative albums which include, The Mirror Pool, and Duality, which was done with Brendan, but not as a Dead Can Dance album. Brendan also continues making music and released Eye of the Hunter in '99. Whether you like dark goth music or worldly sounding music, you should be listening to Dead Can Dance.