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Dead Can Dance - Dead Can Dance CD (album) cover

DEAD CAN DANCE

Dead Can Dance

 

Prog Folk

3.31 | 113 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Dobermensch
Prog Reviewer
4 stars Dead Can Dance's first outing is a purely 'Goth' album played and constructed in an entirely different manner from all subsequent releases. Full of highly contagious tunes and superb vocals by Brendan Perry. Surprisingly there's electric guitar... lots of it! ... and it's continuously echoey in sound just like the Cocteau Twins on their 'Garlands' album. Driving repetitive bass is used on most tunes and is quite similar to 'Joy Division' in style.

I first heard this album in 1986, when astonishingly, I found it in my local library. I guess it was of more importance than I at first realised, as from that moment onwards I never listened to anything 'normal' again. Fast forward 25 years and I find I still love this album. The production values aren't quite up 4AD's usual high standard, but this is more than made up for in the actual song-writing.

Lisa Gerrard sounds spookily like 'Bono' at the start of 'Threshold' which turns out to be one of the best tunes on the album with its aggressive rolling drums and pumping fat bass.

As an added bonus - you get 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' 12" slapped on at the end. Each of these 4 tracks are excellent and pave the way for their follow-up album 'Spleen and Ideal' the following year.

Almost a five star recording but loses the award due to the fact that there's two seriously miserable tracks sung by Lisa Gerrard (Ocean and Musica Eternal) which seem out of place on this recording. The rest of it is simply brilliant.

Dobermensch | 4/5 |

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