Dead Can Dance – Bird
Dead Can Dance – Bird
Dead Can Dance, part of the 4AD stable along with Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil and others, finds inspiration for its popular music excursions from some of the most unlikely places. Some groups, in an attempt to enliven current music, will dig into the vaults of the past to try and unearth some promising vein of old music to revivify. Dead Can Dance goes beyond the vaults and digs up the catacombs to find inspiration in Renaissance and Medieval music. They’re the only working band I know of that has a saltarello in their repertoire.
The band is (or, perhaps, was, as they’ve been pretty quiet for a long time), made up of two people – Brendon Perry and Lisa Gerrard. They live on different continents (he in Australia, she in Europe), but have a strong enough affinity for the music they play that that doesn’t seem to be a problem. Don’t ask me how that works – I had enough trouble keeping a band together that stretched from Silver Lake all the way to Culver City. Brendon is a multi-instrumentalist and notorious perfectionist, and has been known to walk out of performances that didn’t please him. Lisa Gerrard has a stirringly powerful voice and an enormous range is easily able to handle anything Brendon throws at her. I like the songs she sings and the instrumentals better than anything he sings. I constantly got into fights with my coworker Derrick about the merits of the two vocalists. As far as I’m concerned, Brendon has no merits as a vocalist whatsoever, while Lisa has descended straight from the seraphim. Derrick thinks Lisa is serviceable (!), but loves Brendon’s “soulful” baritone. There’s just no accounting for taste, I suppose. Fortunately, Brendon is wise enough to limit his vocals to a couple per disc.
Bird is, as far as I know, unavailable on any studio album and can only be found on their greatest hits package, called A Moment in Time, which I highly recommend. Although the sounds and structures are pretty up-to-date (no crumhorns on this track), and the rhythms pretty compelling, there is still something exotically antiquated about this piece. Plus, it features Lisa’s wonderful wordless vocals (she rarely sings recognizable words on any of their tracks, using her voice more as an instrument than a story-telling device). I also like the way they weave her vocalese together with field recordings of bird songs, suggesting that she’s a bit of a bird herself.
As I said, they seem to have gone their separate ways, and they’ve both released solo albums. I can’t vouch for Brendon’s album as I’ve (not surprisingly) never heard it, but Lisa’s first album, The Mirror Pool, is a wonderful showcase for her unusual voice and far-flung influences, mixing her own compositions with Persian love songs and covers of Handel.