BREATHLESS - Green To Blue

It took as long as seven years for London's Breathless to return to the recording scene. If the wait for a new work from this band - much loved in Italy, among other places - has been a long one, what they now offer will make all their fans happy.

Indeed, "Green To Blue" is a massive double CD whose line-up, alongside longtime members Dominic Appleton (vocals and keyboards), Ari Neufeld (bass) and Gary Mundy (guitar), sees the return of original drummer Tristam Latimer Sayer, who played up through the band's second album, "Three Times And Waving", in 1987.

With this renewed spirit, bridging the distant past and the present, Breathless present eleven lengthy tracks that balance decadent new wave romanticism with liquid psychedelia, favouring the ballad form above all.

In most of the tracks, the English quartet lays down ever-elegant carpets of keyboards over which Ari traces the melodic line with his bass, while the guitar plays with effects-laden notes.

The drums alternate between hushed touches and more sumptuous, emphatic ones, perfectly accompanying the ever-touching vocals of Dominic Appleton, an artist with an unmistakable timbre, who also took part in the historic second This Mortal Coil album, "Filigree And Shadows" (1986), a super-project that brought together the finest names on the 4AD roster of the time.

It was precisely the label boss, Ivo Watts-Russell, who proved a valuable advisor for "Green To Blue", since it was he who suggested the idea of making a double album rather than binning a few songs to fit everything onto a single CD, having been won over by the quality of the material he heard in advance.

Granted, it's long been impossible to hope for a return to the original formula of their '85 debut "The Glass Bead Game" (if you still don't own it, fix that immediately, ed.), with its obsessive, disorienting tracks built on nonetheless melodic harmonies, but here listeners still get to enjoy the caressing, melancholy compositions closer to their later records, which still know how to strike the right emotional chords.

As always, this double album comes out on their own label Tenor Vossa, which some believed defunct but which has in fact been releasing the work of genuinely interesting artists for years, including Tenebrous Liar, Laymar, Moly, …Bender.

"Green To Blue" confirms that Breathless are still alive and kicking, and their breath is something warm and seductive to be enveloped in.

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22/12/2012