| The Serpent's Egg | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Dead Can Dance |
| Cover: | serpent_egg_-_dead_can_dance_-_front.jpg |
| Released: | 24 October 1988 |
| Genre: | Neoclassical dark wave |
| Length: | 36:15 |
| Label: | 4AD |
| Producer: | Brendan Perry, Lisa Gerrard, John A. Rivers |
| Prev Title: | Within the Realm of a Dying Sun |
| Prev Year: | 1987 |
| Next Title: | Aion |
| Next Year: | 1990 |
The Serpent's Egg is the fourth studio album by the Australian band Dead Can Dance, released on 24 October 1988 by record label 4AD.
The album was the last produced while Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard were a romantic couple. A majority of the album was recorded in a multi-storey apartment block in the Isle of Dogs, London.
Perry discussed the album's title: "In a lot of aerial photographs of the Earth, if you look upon it as a giant organism—a macrocosmos—you can see that the nature of the life force, water, travels in a serpentine way".[1]
In a retrospective review, AllMusic said, "Perry and Gerrard continued to experiment and improve with The Serpent's Egg, as much a leap forward as Spleen and Ideal was some years previously", heaping particular praise on the album opener "The Host of Seraphim", which it called "so jaw-droppingly good that almost the only reaction is sheer awe".
"The Host of Seraphim" was featured in the 1992 non-narrative documentary film Baraka (and was included in the film's soundtrack), the theatrical trailers for the 2003 film and the 2006 film Home of the Brave, in the final scenes of the 2007 film The Mist,[3] in the fire scene of the 2010 film Legend of the guardians and in the 2018 film Lords of Chaos.
A short excerpt of "Ullyses" was also used as background music in the BBC Horizon episode #30.7 "Hunt For The Doomsday Asteroid" in February 1994, originally broadcast ahead of the predicted impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with the planet Jupiter in July that same year.
"Severance" was used in the "Victims of Circumstance" episode of Miami Vice.
| Country | Date | |
|---|---|---|
| Australia | 24 October 1988 | |
| United States | 2 February 1994 |