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DEAD CAN DANCE
Architects OF goth

For 15 years, Dead Can Dance — singers Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, supported by percussion, electronica, and guitars — ruled the cultish world of dirge-like ruminations and dark rhythm that fans know as "Goth." They delved deeper into fantasy than the Cocteau Twins; further into gloom than Joy Division; and further back in time than Yaz (covering "Saltarello," a "hit" from 1461). They were diva disco before the term became common, tribal by beat, and forlornly punkish — an irresistible mix of opposite expressions, especially on their first three albums. Thereafter, they began to repeat themselves. Surprise vanished from their music, and Gerrard and Perry stopped working together.

That was then. These days, a reunited Perry and Gerrard are supporting a two-CD best-of retrospective (on 4AD/Rhino) with a tour that brought them to the Orpheum a week ago. Those who came dressed the part — a lot of black, a lot of makeup, a lot of leather and beads. And they did not dress in vain. Gerrard, Perry, and six percussionists and keyboard players performed a mix of favorites and, in the process, showed themselves to be very much Perry’s band. On album, it is Gerrard’s pure, high, diva soprano, singing in exotic languages, with her Egyptian mawal techniques, to the accompaniment of a panoply of Mediterranean rhythms, that captivates. Perry’s charmless, toneless vocals, have often seemed like very cold water spilled on Gerrard’s super-hot fires.

But, live, Perry’s tuneless laments made much more sense. It was his longing — for things to not be as they are, for tragic deaths not to be the inevitable result of living passionately — that established the ground rules: "The stars you see in the night sky have been dead for centuries," he sang. "Someone creates the illusion of life for all these years." There were no stars on the stage, just a backdrop curtain lighted in purple, or dark maroon, or midnight blue. Only Perry spoke. Gerrard stood at her podium, robed in ochre satin like a priestess in a Tolkien book, smiling faintly once in a while. Perry moved about freely; Gerrard slowly, if at all, stiffly, like a Mary in an Easter pageant.

There were no spontaneous passages, not a note unscripted. Gerrard’s diva arias — some of them gender-distorted in the electronica — barely seemed to emanate from her rather than from the music board she played. The music was over-orchestrated, top-heavily operatic, disproportionate. Other than Gerrard’s occasional voice distortion, the gender gap between her and Perry was much too vast — he bald, bearded, and stocky, with a bear-like voice; she gilded and illuminated, singing faraway lullabies. Perry sounded like the antithesis of Bryan Ferry (and in one song, like an anti–Bruce Springsteen), Gerrard like the anti–Maria Callas. Without ever saying so, DCD subverted just about everything, from faith to honor, from "art" to folk, from the past that they made such curiously obsessive use of to the future that they conjured. And Perry was the master conjurer.

BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG

Issue Date: October 17 - 20, 2005
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