Review Revue: Dead Can Dance - Aion

Welcome to Review Revue, where every Thursday I dig through the KEXP stacks to share DJ reviews and comments written on the covers of LPs (and occasionally CDs) in the ’80s and ’90s, when the station was called KCMU, the DJs were volunteers, and people shared their opinions on little white labels instead of the internet.

Next Wednesday, May 22nd, is World Goth Day, and we here at KEXP are taking it very seriously (is there any other way to take World Goth Day?). Given that the '80s and early '90s, my general stomping grounds for this column, are incredibly fertile ground for goth and goth-adjacent music, I felt I would be derelict in my duties if I didn't picky a gothy album in anticipation of the holiday. (It is a holiday, right? I need to double-check that I get the day off work.)

But what is goth music? It's a tricky genre — if it even is a genre — to define, encompassing as it does a wide range of sounds. Sometimes it's loud, sometimes it's heavy, sometimes it rocks, sometimes it's pretty. I figure the safest definition is "music beloved by goths," and we are on pretty solid ground in categorizing the idiosyncratic, decidedly non-rocking music of Dead Can Dance in that category. I don't know if there were any goth DJs at KCMU in 1990, when the band's 5th album Aion was released, but the album was almost universally well-received — to the point that there started to be a clamoring to move it out of heavy rotation, which always indicates something has been well-loved by DJs and listeners alike.

Dead Can Dance — who are still a band, and released a new album last year — are currently on tour, celebrating the range of their work since 1980. Maybe they'll play something from Aion — I do hope they brought a hurdy-gurdy with them.