The first Dead Can Dance album was also the only time when the core duo of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard could be said to be leading a conventional rock band as such, making it an inadvertant outlier for the rest of their extensive careers since. But as such it retains a remarkable stark power, both of their voices testing initial limits as they sing or at times almost declaim over rumbling and agreeably dramatic arrangements that understandably slotted them into a goth framework that carried over as well into future work.