Stegzy's Music Project

A commentary on Stegzy's album collection

It’ll End in Tears – This Mortal Coil [#644]

Gloomy collaborative music by Evo Watts’ music project This Mortal Coil.

Like Mike Oldfield’s Islands this was also part of a x for £xx deal at the Virgin Megastore in Liverpool (now Claus Ohlson). I mourn the passing of record shops and their x for £xx deals, this is not an offer the likes of Amazon, iTunes and their ilk seem to foster. I was drawn to This Mortal Coil and their 1984 album It’ll End in Tears via the 4AD Uncut Compilation CD and David Lynch’s Lost Highway in which the band’s cover of Tim Buckley’s Song of the Siren featured and marked the beginning of me being a little more adventurous with my music choices. However I only became aware of them following the rerelease of the album in the nineties.

Of course, this was in the nineties so music downloading hadn’t really taken off in the UK due to the crapness of internet connectivity but it quickly became a prized item in my music library. Especially as it made me feel that I appeared cultured and with it to my Guardian reading, coffee table book owning friends at the time.

Hipster? moi? Nah my trousers are not corduroy and I don’t own a penny farthing.

Apologies for the break in posts last week, I’m still rebuilding my music library following an IT issue with my iMac, and have just returned from a holiday in Dorset so posts will be a little sporadic for a few weeks. However, please do not feel I’ve abandoned this project or stopped writing, I haven’t. Keep an eye out on my other blog, the Compostual Existentialist over the next few weeks for details of my recent holiday.

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Gothic Spleens – Dead Can Dance [#544]

UnknownAs we finally come out of the (reduced) gothic compilation portion of the project, we see the peaks of “Greatest Hits” ahead of us but until then there are a few more albums we need to visit.

Gothic Spleens is another bootleg album for Neoclassical/Goth group Dead Can Dance. Recorded from a live radio broadcast from Hamburg’s  Musikhalle in 1990. It has a similar track listing to Golden Age but certainly doesn’t disappoint. Even if we’ve heard it all before.

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Golden Age – Dead Can Dance [#536]

goldenagegifMore neoclassical caterwauling from Brendan Perry with added woeful wailing from Lisa Gerrard in this compilation of bootlegged performances from across Dead Can Dance’s “Golden Age”.

I think the compiler chose anything prior to the world music influenced Into the Labyrinth as the band’s “golden age” to select songs from. Of course, they may have compiled it before that album was released. Who knows?

Tracks listed include In Power We Entrust the Love Advocated, Oman, Toward the Within and my favourite, Rakim amongst others. All lovingly performed by the gang in Paris 1988 and Hamburg in 1990.

 

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Eye of the Hunter – Brendan Perry [#446]

Eye of the HunterHi there! Steelrattus again, on day 8 of his 10 day guest stint.

I’m not familiar with Brendan Perry, but I am familiar with Dead Can Dance, a band he formed with Lisa Gerrard in 1981, when he was 22. Perry has followed what seems to be the roots of most musicians, that is starting in one genre, and moving to a completely different one. In his case he formed a punk rock band in 1979, before forming the markedly different Dead Can Dance. Dead Can Dance split up in 1998, which is a year before his solo effort Eye of the Hunter was released, although they did reform twice subsequently.

After listening to Eye of the Hunter I would have filed it under alternative 90s Americana. I got the date vaguely right (1999), but Perry’s a Brit – not to say of course he can’t write songs in the genre, although Wikipedia describes it as folk rock, dream pop (?!). The album title comes from a lyric in the second track, Voyage of Bran. The fourth track, Sloth, has featured on a Dead Can Dance compilation album, curiously. The fifth track, I Must Have Been Blind, is a cover of the 1970 Tim Buckley song.

I liked the album in a 3/5 way. Not exactly my favourite genre, and it got rather repetitive for me. As always, YMMV.

Here’s the opening track, Saturday’s Child…

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