Brendan Perry. Wow, this name takes me back a bit. Last time I caught ear of Brendan Perry’s lugubrious, unearthly baritone was when I was poncing around Sheffield Collegiate as an English undergraduate, a dog-eared copy of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Book of Hugely Precocious Smart Arse, All Knowing, All Trouble-Avoiding Verse’ hanging out of my back pocket and a lifetime subscription to 4AD records carved into my forearm (well written in red biro, to be fair). For all those who might have forgotten, Brendan was the chap in the chap-girl duo, Dead Can Dance in the eighties. The duo had carved a heroically eclectic niche on 4AD, and whilst rarely (if ever) threatening the charts, their wordy and absurdly pretentious brand of ‘renaissance music’ had this darkly sinister and prohibited vibe about it. It was music to be played in cloisters not discos. You couldn’t dance to it, but you could indulge in various acts of self-flagellation and substance abuse as you loosened your cravat, peeled off your billowing paisley shirt and nodded your head in a generously sentient fashion. And not only did they sound weird and from another period in history entirely they also had these wonderful album covers. Can you imagine Pixie Lott releasing an album referencing the likes of Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’? No. Thought not. Anyway, with the release of ‘Ark’, Brendan Perry is restoring a panel of 1980s retro unlikely to be repeated by the likes of Lady Ga Ga or La Roux in a hurry. If you loved all those richly literate musings and harpsichord, lutes and theremins the first time around, you’re likely to engage with ‘Ark’, his new album. It’s still gothic, it still has classical elements but it shifted in a jazzy John Cage/Scott Walker direction, and whilst Perry may not be thumping five pounds of raw meat against a table in an attempt to get the right percussive sound, he does produce some fairly uncommon results, ‘The Bogus Man’ recalling the menacing swagger of a James Bond Theme Tune on the one hand, and the snarling procrastination of a Russian Chess Champion on the other. If anything, it’s more accessible than the ‘Dance’ with songs like ‘Utopia’ and ‘Crescent’ giving the likes of Bjork a run for her egg-laying, shirt-tearing, amok-running money and ‘Wintersun’ sounding as fresh and as relevant (and perhaps even more useful) than an Apple invention.