Dead Can Dance: Toward the Within (2LP) [4AD]

Why you'll love it

This 2LP set is pressed in the EU with printed inner sleeves. Recorded live in a single take, it's Dead Can Dance's first live album, and most of its 15 songs had never appeared on their studio records.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Printed inner sleeves
• Pressed in the EU
• Lyrics included

About the album

In November 1993 Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry took the stage at the Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica and played a set made mostly of songs their fans had heard on bootlegs or not at all. They recorded it in one take. It turned out to be the last major event at the old theatre before the Northridge earthquake closed it a couple of months later, and Mark Magidson, the producer of the film Baraka, was there to film it.

The music roams far and wide. "Rakim" and "Persian Love Song" lean east, "Yulunga (Spirit Dance)" builds slowly from Gerrard's wordless voice, Perry sings the Irish ballads "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and "I Am Stretched on Your Grave," and "Cantara" whirls into a frenzy. Gerrard's "Sanvean" is a hushed, soaring showpiece, and she later re-recorded it for her solo album The Mirror Pool. A circle of musicians who'd played with the duo before fill out the sound.

It's a live record that works as a set of new songs, and a reminder that the duo never needed much more than a stage and a quiet audience to make a room disappear.

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Tracklist

Listen

On 4AD (cat# DAD 3627), a reissue of the 1994 live album.