Like labelmates the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance blurred genres like few acts before them. Goth, rock, medieval, world, ambient, new age, classical-- any and all of these descriptors were fair game, their various hyphenate combinations more often than not reflecting the tastes and preferences of the listener rather than accurately capturing the group's slippery, essentially unclassifiable collision of exotic sounds.
Yet just as with the Cocteau's enigmatic chanteuse Elizabeth Fraser, Dead Can Dance singer Lisa Gerrard was something of a genre unto herself. No disrespect intended her longtime Dead Can Dance collaborator and fellow singer Brendan Perry, but it's Gerrard's voice that remains the band's most identifiable component, which also explains Gerrard's relatively high profile outside of Dead Can Dance. She's continually tapped to lend a certain atmospheric imprimatur to movies from such mood masters as Michael Mann and Ridley Scott, and over the course of the last ten years she's recorded a handful of solo albums and collaborative projects that have kept the Dead Can Dance thread going (especially given former partner Perry's less-than-prolific nature).
The totally unnecessary The Best of Lisa Gerrard, however, is as one might presume not really part of that ongoing thread. Instead, the disc attempts to encapsulate Gerrard's career-- both with Dead Can Dance and beyond-- over the course of a scant 13 tracks. In its defense, the impeccably designed (but of course) disc was compiled and sequenced by Gerrard herself, but squeezing a voice so expansive down to a space this small remains a Pyrrhic victory, really, no matter who's doing the heavy lifting. The results mostly serve as a reminder that's there's so much more out there beyond this modest collection.
The disc starts out with "Sacrifice", a collaboration with Pieter Bourke that trainspotters may recognize from Mann's The Insider (among other places it's been used), then segues back a few years into the Dead Can Dance catalog for "Ariadne" before offering a live version of that band's "Sanvean". From there on out it smoothly glides back and forth through these two major settings-- solo and Dead Can Dance-- hitting such predictable, ethereal highlights as DCD's "The Host of Seraphim" and scattered tracks from her solo career.
And therein lies the rub. It's probably safe to assume that fans of Gerrard's solo work are already fans of her Dead Can Dance work, or vice versa, and have already heard or bought everything included on this best-of. It's probably also safe to assume that this disc was instead intended for those who may have only encountered Gerrard's voice in passing, were intrigued by what they heard and wanted a simple one-stop-shopping place to start.
That's fair enough, except that Gerrard's not much of an iPod-age track-by-track sort of artist, and best-of or no best-of, searching for a simple place to start simply isn't as easy as it seems. She's more an all or nothing proposition, and if you like something from her you'll likely like almost everything, which would of course then render something like this set moot. Which boils down to this caveat: if you're at all curious, just grab a Dead Can Dance album, pretty much any of them. And if you like what you hear, buy more. Time will determine a best-of for you.
