Dead Can Dance: Aion [4AD]

Why you'll love it

This 4AD reissue comes with a printed inner sleeve and the Hieronymus Bosch cover art. Aion is the album where Dead Can Dance went deepest into early music, from a 14th-century Italian dance to a 16th-century Catalan ballad.

This edition

• Printed inner sleeve
• Hieronymus Bosch cover art
• Lyrics included

About the album

Most bands record their fifth album in a studio. Dead Can Dance made Aion largely in a converted church in Ireland, Quivvy Church, which Brendan Perry had just made his home, and you can hear the stone walls in every echo.

Perry described the music as synonymous with the Bosch period, and he and Lisa Gerrard play it with hurdy-gurdy, viols, bagpipes and their own extraordinary voices. "The Arrival and the Reunion" opens with the male soprano David Navarro Sust, "Saltarello" turns a 14th-century Italian dance into something hypnotic, "Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book" sets words by the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora, and "Black Sun" and "The Promised Womb" show the duo at their most haunting. John Bonnar plays keyboards on the Góngora setting, and Robert Perry adds bagpipes to "Saltarello" and "As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins."

The cover is a detail from Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, which suits the music perfectly. It is also, we'd gently point out, the most respectable way to hang a 500-year-old masterpiece in your living room.

Also at Kops: more Dead Can Dance on vinyl · browse Industrial & Goth

Tracklist

Listen

On 4AD (cat# CAD 3639), a reissue of the 1990 album.