Dead Can Dance Album: “1981-1998”

I've been eagerly anticipating the release of this collection since its announcement months before. This set delivers on its promises and there is much on this box set for Dead Can Dance fans to salivate over. It comes in a thoughtfully designed sleeve, with the 4 discs included inside a hardbound book of landscape photographs and text information.

One of the notable items to be excited about is the inclusion of the DVD. This includes the concert performance TOWARD THE WITHIN (with interview footage), along with five promotional videos ("The Host of Seraphim", "Frontier", "The Protagonist", "Yulunga", and "The Carnival Is Over"). The videos are rich with imaginative direction and ideas (especially "Carnival"), such a far cry from the rubbish that passes as music videos these days. It's a shame DCD didn't produce more of these.

The audio CDs also offer new and exciting additions to the DCD cataloge. "Labor of Love" and "Threshold" find DCD (band mates Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard) closer to a conventional Rock band unit, complete w/ guitars and drum machine rhythms, and thus got tagged early in their career as "Gothic Rock". DCD surprised everyone when they made a stunning foray into exploring music from various cultures and time periods, thus producing diverse material from the Italian 14th century dance-step of "Salterello" to the percussive African rhythms of "Nierika".

The most valuable item on this set is the inclusion of the final track that Perry and Gerrard recorded together as DCD, called "The Lotus Eaters". This song was to be included on the band's follow-up to the SPIRITCHASER album, but the rest of the proposed album's music never materialized, leaving this bittersweet glimse of what musical directions DCD might have taken next. Gerrard weaves her stunning voice in and around the leisurely pace of the drums and Perry's guitar playing. The impact of the break-up of DCD is felt greatest on this song.

If you haven't discovered DCD's music yet then I suggest that you discover a band whose body of work is both ahead and out of our time.

I'm a huge Dead Can Dance fan, and bought this Box Set to complete my collection. Was it worth it? Without listening to it, I can say a definitive and enthusiastic "yes!"

Why? Because I opened up the package to find a DVD inside with the Towards the Within Live concert video in it. Only better! The DVD also includes 5 music/promotional videos. The video for "Yulunga" set to the visuals from the film Baraka is a definite highlight. Also the videos for "Protagonist" and "Frontier" are quite a nice/strange visual experience.

The packaging is a beautiful booklet full of images and a history. The only drawback is that it's so nice, I don't want to open it to get the discs out.

Any new Dead Can Dance fan will enjoy the three discs that will expose them to this wonderful music. Any old DCD fan will want this for the DVD. Totally worth it.

Dead Can Dance's cover art invokes that seen on Joy Division's own 1981 final release STILL, but despite the overarching sense of dread that colors almost all of the music by both bands, Dead can Dance offered a far more widescreen view of all those cosmic uncertainties we depend on day-to-day reality to shield us from. Both Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, DCD's yang and yin, accessed the beauty in uncertainty as well as the listener's fear of same, but each came at it from a different angle: Perry realized as Jim Morrison did before him that (to quote William Blake) there are things that are familiar and things that are not, and in between were doors (no pun intended). And doors were meant to be opened, which may explain

Perry's Morrison-like stance as the guide across the threshold

into the darkness. Lisa Gerrard, with her often wordless swooping alto, seemed to embody That Which Was Waiting Over There, and which in its verbally inarticulate yet vast connotations and denotations, defied description because (as in the St. Vitus Dance-like "Cantara," just one example to be found here), painted such strong images in the listener's mind it didn't need words to bring it to life. The two approaches do not

have Ian Curtis' Biblical sense of bewildered acceptance, but

the totality of DCD's presentation is plenty evocative without that one element. DCD drew their musical palette from Gregorian chant, the choral works of John Tavener and Arvo Part, Eastern European folk music and the symphonies of Henryk Gorecki (#3 most strongly), all elements far enough off the mainstream to underline the otherworldliness of their point of view (see "Avatar," "Summoning of the Muse," "How Fortunate the Man With None"). The use of choruses, cellos, heavy echo and horns after the first recording iced the cake, augmenting their ideas' sense of massiveness (see "De Profundis," "The Host of Seraphim"). Over seventeen years, this approach (added to and widened to include Middle Eastern and African influences as well)

brought us a whiff of that which was not explainable, its allure and its ability to repulse; balancing on that knife-edge, listeners who were willing to suspend their disbelief heard

something in the band's art which an increasingly secular, pre-packaged culture and society hastens to bury a bit deeper with every passing day. Hamlet was right when he told Polonius that there are things in heaven and earth which are not dreamt of in our philosophy: thanks to Dead can Dance among others, we can still hear them and glimpse them, looking in at us in our little circle of light that we call reality.

Dead Can Dance (DCD) music can move you deeply, both in an emotional and in a physical sense. While simple at first glance, it has a quite complex background and you can almost always find details you didn't realized yet.

Regarding this box set, it tries to cover all DCD career and I think it does it quite good. Yes, radio versions and first songs have poor sound quality. Yes, song ABCD is missing. But you can still find the musical essence of DCD in the CD (and their musical essence is unique and really beautiful).

The presentation is luxurious (hand-made looking booklet with discs intertwined inside), although I don't know if it's worth the money.

The booklet is beautiful, but I can't find the relationship between the photos and the text. Some lyrics are incomplete but I find it a good work anyway.

The concert and the videos are simply great. It's just amazing to watch Lisa, Brendan and all the band playing live. But... again, image quality is poor (it seems as if they just moved the VHS to DVD, so you get VHS image quality, not DVD image quality). No subtitles, but the DVD menu is original.

In short: if you're a fan and you're missing anything contained in the box, consider buying it. If not, maybe you should consider other alternatives (the box European equivalent, "Awake" - 2 CD and no DVD - ; or some of the albums)

I had two of their albums already. This one is by far the best. I don't like the packaging much though. It's in the form of a small hardback book. There are four discs; 3 CDs and the DVD of Toward the Within. The music is absolutely phenomenal. My coworkers asked me "What style is it?" There is no one specific style. It's a conglomeration of Medieval sounds, Arabian music, Indian music, light rock, and others.