Album Of The Week: Dead Can Dance Anastasis

My wife, just now: "Are you listening to monk music up there?" Close enough! Among the vampire-pop auteurs who first gave 4AD Records its signature sound, Dead Can Dance were the ones whose music sounded the most ancient and ritualistic, and that was certainly by design. The Australian duo pulled from different ancestral-music traditions from around the planet, spinning it all into a deep and heady sonic fog. Like a ton of other stuff in the '80s and '90s, the band often got tagged as "world music," but that wasn't really right at all, since it was practically impossible to trace any of their songs back to one specific culture. Instead, they brought Middle Eastern ragas and Gregorian chants and Celtic hymns and African drum-ripples into a spaced-out goth-pop sound that wasn't ultimately too far removed from the Cure or the Cocteau Twins. Thanks to their formless swirl, the duo worked as the alternative nation's equivalent to Enya or Clannad or something. But the songs underneath all their ancestral sound-layers had real hooks, and something like "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" sounded like a rare glimpse into the uncanny on early-'90s alt-rock radio. Now that the duo are back together and they've recorded their first album in 16 years, it's remarkable how little time has done to alter their sound, and how well it still works.