Interesting to see the fuss that kicked off last week when research indicated that some new forms of music discovery might be cannibalising sales: "NPD has found that free online radio leads to a 41% increase in paid downloads but free on-demand music leads to a 13% decrease in paid downloads." Certainly there was a time when I used to gamble a fair bit of my money on music discovery, buying albums I'd never heard to see if I liked them. I don't do that any more. Well, maybe a bit on eMusic, where the unit cost of a download is low so you can have a flutter downloading three or four tracks to see if, after a few plays, you like them enough to download the rest. But mostly I do my dabbling on the free on-demand services. So those services have substituted for what would have been purchases in the old days. Would I go back to purchasing if We7 and Spotify were wiped out tomorrow? No chance.
A quarter of a century ago, when I bought Spleen and Ideal, we music discovery gamblers had intuitively developed foraging strategies to guide our explorations. First establish a beachhead patch that you can be reasonably confident of, and then put out feelers from there, try and catch the scent of something interesting. In this case the beachhead patch was the first This Mortal Coil album. It wasn't a big leap from there to Dead Can Dance as both members of DCD played on the TMC album. The scent that made this album seem interesting involved more tenuous factors, like the striking cover image and the reference to Baudelaire in the album's title (it wasn't actually the Baudelaire itself that attracted me, but the fact that there's a lyric on Jon Anderson's Animation that also refers to the spleen and ideal).
I hadn't realised it would be so gothic. Five years ago, I was walking home early one evening and found the bottom of Whitecross Street awash with pasty-faced bipeds dressed in impossibly long coats, like a swarm of flying ants in monochrome humanoid form. Once I got back, I checked the Barbican listings and found that Dead Can Dance were playing a rare gig. Wikipedia would have us believe that Spleen and Ideal "is considered the group's best album from a lyrical standpoint". At first I assumed that meant the album with the best lyrics, but perhaps it refers to a particular style or position of listening known as the "lyrical standpoint"? Anyway, it can't refer to the lyrics: they're mostly indecipherable, and when I went to LyricWiki to help decode them, I found, "Lucretia waits in vain for the child of her dreams / Within her aching womb there burns a funeral pyre." LyricWiki also tipped me off that Dead Can Dance are 'darkwave': Last.fm defines and elaborates with examples.
As you can tell, I don't number this among my more successful gambles. I don't hate it, but after 25 years each play it's had cost me about a pound (not allowing for inflation). Well done, Record Industry, for 'monetizing' those plays so effectively. But if you ever imagined you could carry on getting £0.10 for each play of each track, you've got another think coming.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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