Pitchfork

The much-maligned category "World Music" seems to have been invented for Dead Can Dance. From the beginning, Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard thought of their work in global terms, as music from any latitude and any era was fair game for appropriation and assimilation into their distinctive musical vision. Somehow, because they never lost sight of core aesthetic principals that began with their dark self-titled debut in 1984, their borrowing never seemed displeasingly imperialistic or slanted toward cultural tourism. They cared about the music that interested them and they had an intuitive understanding of how it would fit into the Dead Can Dance project.

Representative samples of almost every Dead Can Dance style can be found on this, the fourth Dead Can Dance collection and third since Perry and Gerrard parted ways in 1999. There's the soft, ethereal ambience of "Ariadne" which would really begin to flower when Gerrard turned her attention to film soundtracks. There's the intense, ritualistic Near East vocalizations on "Cantara", which finds Gerrard unleashing the full power of her amazing voice in a cavernous Wall of Sound production driven by tribal drums. "Enigma of the Absolute" from 1985's Spleen and Ideal is an excellent showcase of the band at its most gothic, with the deeply echoing production conjuring images of a medieval cathedral as dusk.

Other tracks impress simply with the strength of the tunes. On "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" Perry seamlessly blends instruments from a handful of different cultures-- sitar, antara, guitar, synth, violin-- and make them work together in a conventionally Western songwriting style that could easily be translated to a rock context. Further into the pure singer-songwriter direction is Perry's voice-and-guitar showcase "American Dreaming", which I remember being on regular rotation on post-Nirvana "alternative" radio in 1995. Though the sonic experience of the band was a large part of their appeal, Dead Can Dance didn't need exotic production to get over.

Memento is the fourth Dead Can Dance compilation and the third since Perry and Gerrard parted ways in 1999, but it's the only single-disc set spanning their entire career. Actually, "entire career" is not quite accurate, since it avoids the classically Goth debut album completely and focuses heavily on two early '90s albums that coincided with the band's breakthrough in the United States. Such a focus makes sense considering that Memento was conceived partly as a souvenir for those who came out for their recent reunion tour. Dead Can Dance was an intense band requiring a certain commitment, and for a lot a lot of people 70 minutes of prime music is all they will really need. For them this is definitely the place to start.