Dead Can Dance – Dionysus

[PIAS]

As a long-time fan, I found Dead Can Dance’s comeback album Anastasis a tad disappointing – that mesmerising sheen of old seemed oddly suppressed, and I don’t think the use of machined percussives helped matters either. Anyways, hearing Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry had a new album out, I thought I’d give them another try — and I’m so glad I did as this new offering Dionysus is absolutely fabulous.

The drama is right back, front and centre, tensive and towering (even better than previously). There’s a drum-heavy vibe full of diverting details and spiralling colour, the bright-beaded Huichol mask of the cover art burning as vividly as the music. A rhythmic world tour without feeling touristic, Dionysus is both ancient and contemporary. The canvas blooms and curves, teases in texturing dualities, chanting deflections and slanted percussives with a Spiritchaser-esque vibe that hypnotically holds and floats in tracers of vocal and harpsichording glints.

The noir-esque dulcimer of “Liberator Of Minds” hitting a dervish deliciousness has you caught in its middle eastern flavours and owling flutes, snared on the reverberating shivers of those thick-skinned drums, a tented caravanserai curling under a cinnamon sky. “Dance Of The Bacchantes” (that closely follows) upping the groove-some-ness on vocal Apaches and harder percussion is a feisty concoction with tribal cross-shots and mouth harps that bring to mind the bewitchment of that Bulgarian Voices BooCheeMish album Lisa appeared on earlier in the year. I love a bit of cross-pollination and this is Venn diagramming a lot of Dead Can Dance’s back catalogue with a renewed vigour, throwing out wonderful new sensations.

Mostly instrumental up until now, the flip side piles the platter with some mighty fine duetting, Perry delivering some sexy Arabic-like vocals for Lisa to gymnastically shadow, to pour over in phonetic flourishes. Again, the instrumentation is hot and incisive, blurs around them in shunted accords and fluting ophidia (and it sounds like they’ve employed a whole village of shield-thumpers to help with this one). A magnificent track that peters out with goat burrs and cattle bells which morphically paint your skull in open-air cinematics. The lurid buzz of flies slipping into “Chant Of The Paladin”-like metallics; the hand cymbals of “The Invocation” as the vocals leap and shift equilibrium between flickering focal points.

Everything falls into place so effortlessly; Perry’s shivering baritone on “The Forest” as the bass descends are encircled with dulcimer diamonds then harmonically harboured in a light dusting from Gerrard, a pleasure that ends too quickly on the rainforest sounds of “Psychopomp”. This is a peyote-pawed creation, rhythmically rustled as Brendan and Lisa lock into delectable unison and a deeply meditative vibe full of falling pebbles and Amazonia richness. An aural hallucinogen that brings on a need to play “Echolia / Mother Tongue” from The Serpent’s Egg once again.

Welcome to the resurrection — Dionysus is thirty-six minutes of pure quality.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-