Oh no, The Serpent’s Egg is the typical discography progression of following up the album where they hit their stride full of energy (Within the Realm of a Dying Sun) with the same tone but stripped back because the band is consciously aware they can’t repeat themselves but don’t have a genuine idea where to head next.

This explores the ambient side of Dead Can Dance’s classical darkwave, but that’s not saying much at all, because DCD have always been making mood-setting music yet with heavy dynamics and arrangements. Here they’ve got the mood right, but not the ambition. These repetitive songs are laziness disguised as restraint. The evidence is how poorly the album is structured, not flowing as a full picture but coming across as a collection of little snippets. The previous two albums were cohesive works. It’s Dead Can Dance doing Dead Can Dance, but their solution for hiding that was to make it less. Instead, The Serpent’s Egg just feels redundant compared to what came before it.

Let’s be real here: this is one step away from Enya, probably one of those artists a Dead Can Dance fan would call “totally lame” and “inoffensive” or something like that. Enya’s done better than this though.