As Thomas Aquinas observed, everything on Earth is orderable. Not orderable in the sense that gizmo.com will ship you any electric nail buffer your heart desires, or in the sense that Pizza Mart will deliver a plastic Buzz Lightyear figurine with an accompanying pepperoni slime with extra cheese residue. No, Aquinas and I mean that you can categorize everything in the world. And by breaking all that stuff into categories, you'll find it a lot easier to figure out how significant a particular object or thought is.

So I turn with this in mind to that most mocked of genres: goth. And as I can't really grasp goth in its entirety, I break it down into manageable chunks, or categories, and produce the goth continuum. On the left hand side the spectrum crouches the media's fave incubus, Marilyn Manson, representing S/M goth. At the other end sits the Laura Ashley-adoring All About Eve, cross-legged, candlelit, and decked in cheap pre-Raphaelite drapings.

By applying Pathways and Dawns to the goth continuum, I have discovered that Peter Ulrich, former percussionist with the medievally doomy Dead Can Dance, belongs in the "Gaia-goth" category. As he gamely turns his hurdy-gurdy, and thrims on his shaker-bells, Ulrich imprecates the great Mother Goddess to embrace him and release him from "the chains of order" and to clear his spirit of this world's orderables.

Pathways and Dawns features two tracks from 1990, and the remaining six are from 1997. "Taqaharu's Leaving," on of the tracks from '90, was the first time I'd heard solo Ulrich. I bought the 12" release for thirty pence in a ramshackle Record Exchange in London's Camden Town. Putting the record on the turntable, I was transported from my student grime of Northwest London to some frostbitten battlefield, where the boy hero of the song wanders still gleeful at the prospect of going off to battle, and, in the end, finds that "war's more fun than hide- and- seek." This maudlin sentiment, reminiscent of adolescent introspective verse, is enhanced by a willowy oboe line and an autumnal string section, naturally. And just to assure the pathos is excessive, some soprano ululates as Taqaharu receives "his plastic key to heaven/ takes his holy vow" and then disappears. It worked a treat ten years ago in the perpetual rain of pre-Cool Britannia Camden Town, but now that I'm older and can afford light and heat (and have migrated to Washington, D.C.), it falls rather flat.

To be fair, Ulrich has grown up, too, as 1997's "Always Dancing" demonstrates. His voice has gone from a baritone version of Robert Wyatt to aping Before and After Science-era Eno. The music's incorporated electronics a little bit, whilst retaining the earthy instrumentation that gave Dead Can Dance their funereal, moonlit ambience. Lyrically, he's modified his themes accordingly. Not that he's abandoned the preoccupations (or obsessions) of his fan base; there are still plenty of references to life as black sheep, belief in the night-shaded power of dreams, and the omnipresent frown of the sincerity of time. Oh, yes. He's got a long way to go before he's transformed into Liam Gallagher or flips over to the Manson edge of the continuum. But he's making progress. He's just got to keep going down the right pathway and remembering to go to bed before dawn.

-Paul Cooper