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Not dead yet >> With the demise of Dead Can Dance, Brendan Perry reveals the singer-songwriter within
by CHRIS YURKIW
"We were working together for about six weeks on what was to be the successor to Spiritchaser," says Perry of the last, aborted DCD album, "and it became obvious to us that we were pulling away from each other in antagonistic musical directions. I wasn't so keen on working along the classical and Oriental lines, which is essentially what Lisa often required from me as an arranger and writer for her."
Gerrard had already released a couple of solo albums, and with the duo kaput as of those sessions late last year, Perry set about assembling a collection of songs that emphasized his own proclivities. The acoustic guitar. His gentle but resonant baritone. A love of canonized if obscure singer-songwriters like Scott Walker and Tim Buckley, the latter of whom Perry covers on this first solo album in "I Must Have Been Blind."
And so the result is Eye of the Hunter (4AD), markedly different from Dead Can Dance in that it's made up of conventional songs with real words, but similar in tone, grandiosity and serious intent. And where DCD crossed centuries and got called "timeless," Perry grapples with the passing of time on Hunter--the singer-songwriter reborn at 40.
"There's definitely a new audience for this music, because it's very unlike a lot of Dead Can Dance music," says Perry. "It's not so left or right of centre, but a little more mainstream in its influences.
"I think a lot of people are not aware of the fact that Brendan Perry is 50 per cent of Dead Can Dance. In terms of the amount of people who've come to see me in Europe, there haven't been huge numbers in comparison with Dead Can Dance, but I think it's just a question of time." :
Brendan Perry & band + Kristin Hersh at Kola Note Saturday, Nov. 6, 8:30 pm, $24.50+t/s |
Dead Can Dance had a pretty good run. Over 16 years, vocalist Lisa Gerrard and multi-instrumentalist Brendan Perry took ancient ethnic musics, wordless pantheism and proverbially "ethereal" sounds to new, literal heights. Indeed, they were the biggest-selling group in the history of the 4AD label, of which they were emblematic. But they didn't title one of their albums Within the Realm of a Dying Sun for nothing: they always knew that all good things must come to an end.