DEAD CAN DANCE - Ark

The return to recording of an artist of Brendan Perry's stature always makes news, especially given the man's famously reclusive nature: after the end of the Dead Can Dance project, he withdrew into near-total isolation, confirmed by the full eleven years separating his new work "Ark" from his previous solo album, the splendid "The Eye Of The Hunter".

Recorded at the same studios where, at the same time, Glen Johnson was shaping "Ovations" – an album Perry himself contributed to, lending his voice to two tracks – "Ark" bears only a faint trace of that parallel, though some of its most pervasive electronic textures do echo the spectral atmospheres so dear to Piano Magic. Perry's wholehearted return to electronics, together with his enduring interest in percussive cadences borrowed from traditional African and Eastern European music, forges a link with the production of the later Dead Can Dance records – a link the ballads of "The Eye Of The Hunter" had largely shed.

Of the eight lengthy tracks that make up "Ark", at least half could easily pass for material from an album by Perry's old band, with him once again delivering priestly intonations of lyrics centred on socio-political themes and, more broadly, stern reflections on the condition of post-modern humanity.

Perry's solemn, priest-like timbre is set against backdrops made up chiefly of digitized horns and strings, which only occasionally give way to richer, more romantic arrangements, threaded through with rhythms and pulses that blend naturalness with synthetic emphasis, ancestral percussiveness with electronic modernity. Indeed, while tracks like the opening "Babylon" and the well-judged single "Utopia" recapture the dark magic of the past even within their unvarying beats, the excessive emphasis placed on electronics ends up transfiguring, for instance, the spectral mood of "The Bogus Man" into something close to trip-hop cadences, and even spills over into the rather incongruous danceable groove of "The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea".

Although Brendan Perry's class shows no sign of being dulled by the passing of time, in spirit and in its meticulous interweaving of an instrumentation drawn from the most varied origins, beyond a handful of harmonic and conceptual ideas "Ark" ends up being too hybrid an affair to stand as a worthy continuation of "The Eye Of The Hunter". On one hand sometimes pedantically flattened against a now-distant past, on the other timidly reaching toward a not always convincing renewal of those old suggestions, "Ark" ultimately balances the welcome return of a voice that remains inspired and intense against the modest achievements of the awkward effort to add something coherent to the choice of returning to well-established expressive modes that, in truth, leave little room for meaningful development.

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22/07/2010