It’s sixteen years since Spiritchaser inadvertently became Dead Can Dance’s final studio record. In the wake of crafting that album, Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard – who had finished their long romance several years previously – also brought their professional relationship to a close, ending one of the freshest, most fruitful male/female musical and vocal collaborations of the late 20th century.
While the band re-united in 2005 for live work and released a series of bootleg-style recordings from the tour, this year marks a return to recording new music together – in effect, a resurrection of their collaborative creative selves.
The result is Anastasis, a characteristically sublime, thought-provoking, artfully structured record that works superbly as a thematic whole. While resonating with the stately, processional, ceremonial sound of the Dead Can Dance we know, the predominant musical and philosophical influences are from the fertile, east-meets-west cultural melting pot of Greece, Turkey and North Africa. From the ominous questions raised by ‘Children Of The Sun’ to the closing notes of faith and hope in ‘All In Good Time’, Anastasis transports us on a near-Eastern Mediterranean journey, which challenges and inspires us by turn, and offers fascinating perspectives from which we can forge a deeper kind of understanding.
Much of DCD’s power comes from the band’s male/female polarity, and on Anastasis, those two magnetic forces find a beautiful equilibrium, with Gerrard fronting four of the eight tracks, in her solemn wordless glossolalia. Across the remaining four tracks, it’s left to Perry to intone, in his own marvellous singing voice, the poetic insight of the visionary. Of these, both ‘Opium’, which uses a Moroccan Sufi 6/8 rhythm, and ‘Amnesia’ deal with the importance of memory in human evolution. ‘Return Of The She-King’, voiced with extraordinary grandeur by Gerrard, diverges from the Eastern Mediterranean influence towards that particularly stately DCD take on Gaelic cadence. The drum-roll powerfully evokes Gráinne Mhaol, the 16th century Irish pirate queen who was its inspiration. In addition to DCD’s hallmark tapestry of orchestral instruments, sitar strings, sharp horn, dulcimer and art-rock guitar, Anastasis features the ‘hang’, a cross between a West Indian steel drum and a gamelan gong.
A key to DCD’s musical sorcery is that Perry and Gerrard take the time and make the effort to immerse themselves in those currents of world or classical music on which they are drawing, for their own alchemical purposes. They complement this process of immersion with meticulous cultural and historical research of the themes and ideas they are grappling with. As a result, at their best, Dead Can Dance weave a golden thread of sacred sound that links cultures and ages which are conventionally seen as being separate, and distil the yearning for expression, connection and transcendence that is common to humanity, no matter the culture or the age.
This golden thread is the unique gift of Dead Can Dance. Anastasis is a powerful and haunting record that presents a wonderful chance to grasp it anew. Savour it.