WITHIN THE REALM OF A DYING SUN

Dead Can Dance’s third album found them moving even further into a more ethereal and classical- leaning sound and, except for Brendan Perry’s vocals, away from the gothic label they had acquired early in their career. The accompanying guest musicians are mostly new, but there is still a wide array of instruments including violin, cello, oboe, trumpet, trombone and timpani. The cello plays a key role and for the most part replaces a tradition bass rhythm, which is one of the things that made the band different from many of their contemporaries in the mid-eighties. Today many post-rock, symphonic and neo-prog as well as conventional bands employ cellos, but twenty years ago this was an instrument largely reserved for faux-classical bands like ELO and Alan Parsons.

The tempo of most of these tracks is a bit slower and less distinctive than the early work of the band, and in my opinion Perry downplays one of the band’s strengths (Lisa Gerrard’s vocals) on too many of these compositions. On some tracks like “In the Wake of Adversity” and “Xavier” she isn’t heard at all, and on others such as “Anywhere out of the World” and “Persephone (The Gathering of Flowers)” her role is diminished. The duo makes up for this somewhat with the trio of tunes “Dawn of the Iconoclast”, “Cantara” and “Summoning of the Muse” where Gerrard is the central vocal character, but this isn’t enough to raise the album into new territory as far as I’m concerned.

And speaking of “Dawn of the Iconoclast”, this was one of the band’s few opportunities to really establish themselves as a musical force, but unfortunately the brief couple of minutes of run-time don’t do justice to the quietly intense mood that starts to build but dies out all too soon.

“Persephone” is another track that doesn’t quite live up to its potential. Even though this is the longest track on the album it suffers a bit from a lengthy ambient passage that does little to embellish the album and makes for an anti-climactic closing to a record that never quite gets its feet under it.

This is probably one of the better known Dead albums, but certainly not their finest work. It does have the distinction of having what it probably their best album cover though, so points for that I suppose.

If you don’t know this band I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point, but it is unquestionably essential for fans. For everyone else I’d give this only a mild recommendation, and three stars are as high as it should be rated. Check out ‘Spleen & Ideal’ for a solid sense of what these two musicians were capable of, and reserve this one for later in your exploration of their music if you ever get to that point.

peace