POP MUSIC REVIEW : Dead Can Dance Can Mix It Up

One doesn’t normally consider the medieval and the Middle Eastern in the same musical breath. But then, the group Dead Can Dance is fairly breathless--no pun intended--in throwing incongruous styles into its stew, with chants and caterwauling foremost among the extreme exoticism. So the duo’s sold-out appearance on Monday tended to alternately turn Royce Hall into a Celtic cathedral or a frantic desert bazaar.

The outfit’s first all-new American release, “Into the Labyrinth,” is expanding the following from minor cult to major cult, even while these Dead stick defiantly with their minor keys and pretty dissonance, with melismatic singing mostly in inaccessible tongues of men and of angels.

At Royce, the Middle Eastern flavor was turned up, with five of the seven musicians on stage often playing brutally melodic percussion.

White robe-clad Lisa Gerrard stood behind a pulpit, playing hammer dulcimer and piloting the most extreme flights of ethereality in an overpowering alto, while partner Brendan Perry, on stringed instruments, crooned slightly more traditional folk fare, welcome amid the foreign affectations. It was all admirably daring, weirdly lovely stuff, if a little too precious and stately to be as moving as it ought.

Dead Can Dance also plays the Wiltern Theatre on Monday.