Dead Can Dance Spleen And Ideal on LP

2016 Reissue!

Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard are Dead Can Dance. Their music began as collages made from musical lineages, lost tribes and cultures long since forgotten - and by giving new life to so much from the past, they created a genuinely timeless body of work. They shared vocal responsibilities, and while Perry was certainly capable of haunting subtleties and real sonority as a singer, it was more often Gerrard's rhapsodic vocalizing that drew the attention of critics and fans. In a sense, Gerrard didn't simply sing for Dead Can Dance: she made sounds with her voice, and turned that experience into something much larger and more far-ranging than mere singing.

Perry's soundscapes blur distinctions between organic and sampled, old and new, drawing on disparate traditions (neo – classical, choral, baroque, troubadour) and weaving together influences from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean and beyond. Somehow Dead Can Dance managed to create a world of profound artistic integrity while simultaneously appealing to fans of what was termed 'alternative rock' music. And in so doing Dead Can Dance became - over the course of their career - 4AD's most internationally successful artists.

Dead Can Dance's second album, Spleen And Ideal (1985), saw them experiment more with instrumentation, abandoning guitars in favor of cello, trombone and timpani. Widely acclaimed, there was now a richness of unification between voice and music, lyrics and structure, showing they had a concrete sense of the aural ideal they were striving towards. Its title was taken from Spleen et Idéal, a collection of poems by 18th century French poet Charles Baudelaire. This 2016 LP version is a repress of the original release.