Dead Can Dance- 1981-1998 (2001) Box Set (3 Discs) MP3 & FLAC

"The great mass play a waiting game, embalmed, crippled, dying in fear of pain."

The career trajectory and creative evolution of Dead Can Dance is quite amazing given the band's humble beginnings: an Australian Punk band called The Marching Girls who couldn't land a recording contract. Brendan Perry eventually quit this band to pursue a more experimental musical muse, which ultimately resulted in the formation of Dead Can Dance with Lisa Gerrard in 1981. Early on, they were a four piece Goth-Industrial outfit with a slightly more exotic sound than most of their peers. However, over the course of the next 20 years, Dead Can Dance would prove to be one of the most singular and timeless bands of the Post-Punk era, integrating Gregorian chant, African percussion, Eastern Folk idioms, and Classical influences such as Arvo Part into their musical palette. The box set 1981-1998 attempts the impossible task of summarizing Dead Can Dance's discography, and while each of their original eight albums is represented by several songs, these, without exception, are better heard in their original contexts. What makes this box set worthwhile for those already familiar with the band's work are the rarities, which, though not plentiful, are quite desirable. Chief among these is a complete John Peel session recorded in 1983, a year before releasing their first LP for 4AD. Even at this early stage in the band's development, Lisa Gerrard's peerless alto and Brendan Perry's strangely Sinatra-esque baritone sound transcendent and creatively restless. Needless to say, this is absolutely essential listening.

This Mortal Coil- Filigree & Shadow (1986) MP3 & FLAC -For Douxee-

"Notes that roll on winds with swirling wings, bring me words that are not the strength of strings."

If This Mortal Coil's first album, It'll End in Tears, felt, at times, a little too much like a 4AD talent sampler, albeit a more original approach to such a thing than the standard record label "comp" (see Lonely Is an Eyesore), the follow up album, Filigree & Shadow, avoids this by being far more ambitious musically and doing so with what had evolved into something resembling a 4AD "in-house" band. While This Mortal Coil's second album is noticeably lacking in 4AD star power (Liz Fraser, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry had all participated on the first album but are absent on the follow-up), vocalists such as Dominic Appleton, Alison Limerick and Deirdre & Louise Rutkowski more than ably lend the cover songs a distinctive feel, often succeeding in liberating them from their original contexts. However, tying these songs together by way of moody, atmospheric interludes are 13 instrumentals that, while listenable, are more forgettable than not. The overall effect of this is both the main strength and primary weakness of the album: sonically, it comes across as remarkably cohesive (a rare feat for a double album), but you also might find yourself skipping over the instrumentals in search of the gems, such as the cover of Pearl Before Swine's "The Jeweller," which alone is worth the price of admission.

Various Artists- Lonley Is an Eyesore: 4AD Compilation (1987) MP3 & FLAC

"Have a fish nailed to a cross on my apartment wall. It sings to me with glassy eyes and quotes from Kafka."

In a certain sense, Lonley Is an Eyesore functions as a time-capsule, a snapshot of Post-Punk circa the mid-Eighties, albeit a snapshot saturated with the particular shades and tinctures of the Goth-informed Dream-Pop of the 4AD stable. As a result, there is an aesthetic cohesiveness to this album that is unusual for a compilation, which stems from that fact that, to some extent, 4AD was pushing a particular (Ivo Watts-Russell produced) sound rather than the bands themselves. This approach was taken a step further with the This Mortal Coil releases, in which various 4AD artists were thrown together in the studio (under the control of Watts-Russell) to record cover songs dressed up in 4AD-style gloom. Despite this overriding emphasis on style over substance, Lonely Is an Eyesore holds up quite well 25 years later because it contains an intriguing mix of the influential (Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses) and the obscure (Dif Juz, The Wolfgang Press, Clan of Xymox), all at the height of their powers. With the exception of the badly dated Colourbox contribution, this album still sounds fresh, dark, and revelatory, even if it is not quite the manifesto it was clearly conceived to be.

Dead Can Dance- "Frontier" Video (1984)

I've got some vintage 4AD in the works you guys, so here's a taster, some early Dead Can Dance: