Feast of Silence
In their early days, Vas was often compared toLisa GerrardandDead Can Dance, but they transcended that comparison long ago. Their sound is forged deep in Middle Eastern and Indian percussion with singer Azam Ali extolling a supralingua style of singing that morphs from ecstatic hieroglyphics to Bulgarian choirs. Born in Iran and raised in India, Ali's pristine voice is steeped in the traditions of those countries. Greg Ellis surrounds her with a global percussion orchestra of the imagination, mixing udu drums, frame drums, mridangam, dumbeks, and just about anything else from his global groove storeroom to create the throbbing rhythmic undertow of their music. His own "Moksha" for percussion, cellos, and bass is an epic, symphonic journey. Azam Ali sings in English for the first time onFeast of Silence, setting Longfellow's "The Reaper and the Flowers" and her own title track. "Feast of Silence" is a veiled reference to her personal travails of the last four years including the death of her mother, her first trip back to Iran since she was a child, and the demise of her personal relationship with Ellis. Despite the personal fractures in the vessel of Vas,Feast of Silenceremains as cohesive and powerful as their three previous CDs. --John Diliberto