Dead Can Dance - Spleen And Ideal

Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard are Dead Can Dance. Their music began as collages made from musical lineages, lost tribes and cultures long since forgotten - and by giving new life to so much from the past, they created a genuinely timeless body of work. They shared vocal responsibilities, and while Perry was certainly capable of haunting subtleties and real sonority as a singer, it was more often Gerrard's rhapsodic vocalizing that drew the attention of critics and fans. In a sense, Gerrard didn't simply sing for Dead Can Dance: she made sounds with her voice, and turned that experience into something much larger and more far-ranging than mere singing.

Dead Can Dance's second album, Spleen And Ideal (1985), saw them experiment more with instrumentation, abandoning guitars in favor of cello, trombone and timpani. Widely acclaimed, there was now a richness of unification between voice and music, lyrics and structure, showing they had a concrete sense of the aural ideal they were striving towards. It's title was taken from Spleen et Idéal, a collection of poems by 18th century French poet Charles Baudelaire.