According to a recentRolling Stone interview, Brendan Perry - one half of the duo known as Dead Can Dance - first conceived the concept for their ninth studio album, "Dionysus", while on a trip to Spain many years ago. Perry was at one of the tamborrada festivals - markedly pagan festivals thinly veiled with Christian trappings, common all over the Mediterranean. They wandered the streets all night, playing drums with hundreds of other drummers, drinking wine, eating olives until they achieved a trance-like state. Perry realized that the whole thing was very Dionysian, similar to the bacchanals honoring the god of wine since time immemorial from ancient Greece and Thrace to Rome, where even the the senators banned the bawdy celebrations upon punishment of death. Those familiar with philosophy will know that Nietzsche tried to encompass a duality of thought by utilizing the dichotomy of two Greek gods - Apollo, who represents the logical and the rational whose adherents worshiped in cities within marble temples, and Dionysus, the god of wine and dance, who appeals to emotion and whose celebrants worshiped in nature in the trees, drunk and giving in to bodily desires.
This dichotomy has always matched Dead Can Dance. Lisa Gerrard has always been the Dionysian - emoting pure feeling with her music, eschewing words to convey her message, relying instead on nonsense syllables. By contrast, Perry was always the Apollonian, his clear baritone always intoning a clear message. This time, however, the band has completed given over to the Dionysian, abandoning spoken language, even giving up traditional song arrangements in favor of a stream-of-consciousness format that consists of two large Acts complete with movements, more like a classical piece meant to be listened to in one sitting.
Dead Can Dance then
Dead Can Dance has always been pagan. From their song titles ("Ariadne") to their lyrics ("The Earth is our Mother, She taught us to embrace the light; now the Lord is Master; She suffers in eternal night."). But also in their sound. To the band, music is a religious experience, a sort of sacrament, able to transport us from the mundane and see visions of other places on the periphery of our psyche. To accomplish this, they have utilized a variety of musical influences and instruments - in the beginning with post-punk and gothic rock, and then using full-fledged orchestras to explore medieval and pre-Renaissance music and finally going full-on tribal with influences ranging from the Middle East to India to Africa to using Native American and Vodun prayers.
Dionysus
"Dionysus" is the best Dead Can Dance release in years, surpassing even the excellent "Anastasis" in terms of innovation and creativity. The music transports you into the myth of Dionysus by resurrecting ancient instruments from the Mediterranean like the mizmar, harp, dulcimer, bagpipes, and violin, plus a variety of drums, creating not so much melodies but musical landscapes. You will see the jagged mountainsides of ancient Greece and the Aegean Sea. This illusion is further strengthened by the use of sound effects - waves crashing on rocks, birds singing, and goats being herded. Perry arranges both his and Gerrard's vocals into complex choral arrangements ranging from trance-inducing chants to reverberating Middle Eastern ululations to achingly sweet harmonies resembling the traditional arrangements performed by the Bulgarian State Women's Choir, bringing to mind the maenads, Dionysus's crazed female followers. The ebbing flow of the music, with its shifting tempos, tries to evoke the ecstatic state sought by those of ancient days who sought the Dionysian Mysteries. The names of the movements suggest at the mythology - "The Liberator", as Dionysus was supposed to free people from their inhibitions, "Dance of the Bacchantes", as Bacchus was the Roman incarnation of Dionysus, "The Mountain" and "The Forest", as this was nature worship, "The Invocation" as a prayer, and "Psychopomp" as an entity who guides one into the afterlife. The result is an unusual collection of music, unusual even for Dead Can Dance whose brand of music has always been difficult to describe anyway. As indescribable as it may be, the album is also unforgettable, and a kind of vindication for those of us who long for them to reunite during their long hiatus.
A couple of side notes - this is Dead Can Dance's second album away from their parent label - the prestigious 4AD label.
Second, I have included the video for "The Mountain" in a link below, directed by Lukasz Pytlik. The video is as cinematic as the music, and the director has said that it was almost as if he had no control and the images arranged themselves. I wish they had made a movie to accompany the whole album.
