FADING COLOURS COME DOUBLE ALBUM BIG BLUE RELEASE: MARCH 13, 2009 REVIEW: MARCH 23, 2009

My year has been made, the decade feels worthwhile; Fading Colours have a new album out, everyone. The trio who gave us 1998's "...I'm Scared of" are back, and my stars have they learned a thing or twelve. Take the song craft, which is so wondrous to behold. "Thorn" sets the tone, it opens the stage, pulls the curtain back. Heavy swells, vitriolic melody lines and an unearthly penchant for atmosphere.

De Coy jumps right into the thick of it on "(I had to) Come"; that voice oh that voice. The machines strain behind her, their very existence forcibly being defined. Is is trip hop, is it electro... it is something else. It is Fading Colours. A lethal cocktail of rock, thick percussive hits and those pauses. Yow! Those pauses!

Fading Colours build tension like no one else. Lescek Rakowski and Daniel Kleczynski have created magnificent aural palettes from which our songstress and siren De Coy chooses and flows over vocally like so much dark chocolate on the tongue. "Be an Angel Again" should please any floor it graces, it's aggressive in ways I'd never have suspected them of entreating. You move, your eyes wide in a schism of assault but then De Coy intones "Your smile was so bright" and you melt. You just melt.

The style begun on their last album over a decade ago has bloomed, like that red rose in the garden. If you ever wondered who defines the saturnine and the surreal, here they are. This is a magnificent sonic confectionary who's second disc ties it all together perfectly. Featuring re-done versions from their entire existence, you'll be running like mad to get your copy. I know I have done little else this past week but listen to this oeuvre ecstatically. Glittering with delerious abandon, we find ourselves in the world of Fading Colours, I for one will not be leaving.

PETER MARKS