Dead Can Dance Announce New Album ‘Anastasis’

Dead Can Dance will release their new album ‘Anastasis’ through [PIAS] Recordings on 13^th August. Available on CD, double LP and download, the album is their first since 1996’s ‘Spiritchaser’. The band, who embark on a world tour in August, have confirmed a show at the Royal Albert Hall on 26^th October. Tickets for the show sold-out within 48 hours of going on sale.

‘Anastasis’ track listing

1. Children Of The Sun

2. Anabasis

3. Agape

4. Amnesia

5. Kiko

6. Opium

7. Return Of The She-King

8. All In Good Time

On the cover of ‘Anastasis’, Dead Can Dance’s first album in 16 years: a field of sunflowers, ripened, and then blackened, by the sun, standing with sad, slightly crowned heads. Lessdead than dormant, the heads and stems will one day be chopped, but then via the roots, will return. For ‘Anastasis’ is the Greek word for ‘resurrection’ and the seemingly dead will dance again.

“I thought ‘Anastasis’ was a good title given our reunion,” explains Brendan Perry, who, with Lisa Gerrard, formed the band in Melbourne, Australia in 1981, releasing seven studio albums, and one live album, before going their own ways after 1996’s ‘Spiritchaser’. “’Anastasis’ also means ‘in between two stages’,” he adds. “Regeneration comes with the next season.”

‘Anastasis’ is perfectly apt given how the album is an astonishing regeneration of the legendary beauty,power and spellbinding nature of the duo’s unique sound and vision. Age hasn’t withered DCD, not the passing of the years; if anything, the album sounds bolder, stronger, more confident in its vision..

A Greek word to represent the album is equally derived from the music’s origins. While Perry can hear echoes of DCD past, “from right across our catalogue,” he reckons the core of Anastasis can be found, “slap bang” in the near-Eastern Mediterranean, from Greece and Turkey across to North Africa. “The music I listen to and research becomes both unconsciously and consciously part of a new project, and for this album, I’ve been fascinated by the classic immutable elements of Greek culture, the depth of their music and their love for song that you don’t get as much in the west; the way they combine philosophy and love songs, and throw a bit of science in there too. I love the eastern influence that comes from being a crossroads between east and west, the kaleidoscopic mosaic of those fused cultures, while the further west you go, the more it’s a mono-cultural society.

Perry says the duo have been talking about another album since Dead Can Dance’s world tour of 2005. But that extensive tour was exhausting, and the incentive was lacking, so it was put on the backburner until calendars could again be synchronised – not so easy since Perry lives in the centre of Ireland (the land of his ancestors), where ‘Anastasis’was recorded (at Perry’s converted church studio Quivvy) and Gerrard lives in Southern Australia. Once upon a time, they left Melbourne for London, settling many floors up in a council block on the Isle of Dogs, putting whatever pittance they had into their music.

Signed by 4AD and releasing their first album in 1984, the duo drew rapturous reviews for albums that spanned neo-classical and folk across time and geography, each album selling to a progressively larger audience, the emotional drama of their coming to the attention of the San Francisco ballet, Hermes Perfume and a documentary on Hitler and Stalin; likewise motion pictures such as Heat, The Crossing Guard and Baraka. Gerrard developed her own solo film soundtracks – The Gladiator and The Insider, for example – while Perry worked on solo albums such as 1999’s ‘Eye Of the Hunter’ and 2008’s ‘Ark’. The pair dissolved their physical relationship in the early ‘ 90s but something keeps them together – a bond of deep friendship and musical compatibility and understanding, and so Anastasis is born, and Dead Can Dance regenerated.