Breathless- Three Times and Waving (1987) MP3 & FLAC -For Douxee's Girlfriend-

"As a matter of course you rush through your lifetime, turning a blind-eye to world-weary crossfire."

As was the case with Breathless' debut album The Glass Bead Game, their follow-up, Three Times and Waving, is a lush, darkly romantic piece of dream-pop that is easily the equal of, if not better than, what the 4AD stable, mining similar aesthetic territory, was producing at the time (okay, with the possible exception of Dead Can Dance). While Dominic Appleton's vocals (sounding something like a more overtly romantic Brendan Perry) clearly set this band apart, he does not take center stage in most of these songs; instead the vocals are integrated into hauntingly ornate but often ominous soundscapes, functioning as just another sonic texture. Appleton's voice has an unusually tender quality, which provides an intriguing counterpoint to the album's Gothic overtones, giving these songs (and all of Breathless' early recordings for that matter) a very unique feel. Tracks such as "Into the Fire" and "Waiting on the Wire" are simply stunning Post-Punk gems, and whenever I listen to Breathless, it amazes me how such a talented and sonically interesting band could have fallen through the cracks of commercial success (come on, they even had a singer with a big voice!).

Breathless- The Glass Bead Game (1986) MP3 & FLAC

"So christen these kind hearts with names they don't deserve, and measure out the sanity that falls into lunacy, hung bitter, sweet-faded and lost."

Despite his stunning vocal performances on This Mortal Coil's Filigree & Shadow, Dominic Appleton's band Breathless was inexplicably fated to spend the next two decades toiling away in abject obscurity despite being one of the more interesting and talented Post-Punk bands of the mid-eighties. Breathless integrated the dark dream-pop associated with the 4AD label with Appleton's dramatic (and sometimes sinister) vocals, sounding, at times, like a more straightforward version of Dead Can Dance or a more lushly ornate version of Joy Division. On The Glass Bead Game, named after a Hermann Hesse novel, Appleton & co. traverse some dark sonic territory, such as on the memorable "Monkey Talk," where Appleton's vocals take on the cadence of a death-chant as foreboding guitar textures and rolling percussion slowly build a soundscape of beauty and dread. For anyone interested in 4AD-style gloom, Breathless will be a revelation.

This Mortal Coil- Filigree & Shadow (1986) MP3 & FLAC -For Douxee-

"Notes that roll on winds with swirling wings, bring me words that are not the strength of strings."

If This Mortal Coil's first album, It'll End in Tears, felt, at times, a little too much like a 4AD talent sampler, albeit a more original approach to such a thing than the standard record label "comp" (see Lonely Is an Eyesore), the follow up album, Filigree & Shadow, avoids this by being far more ambitious musically and doing so with what had evolved into something resembling a 4AD "in-house" band. While This Mortal Coil's second album is noticeably lacking in 4AD star power (Liz Fraser, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry had all participated on the first album but are absent on the follow-up), vocalists such as Dominic Appleton, Alison Limerick and Deirdre & Louise Rutkowski more than ably lend the cover songs a distinctive feel, often succeeding in liberating them from their original contexts. However, tying these songs together by way of moody, atmospheric interludes are 13 instrumentals that, while listenable, are more forgettable than not. The overall effect of this is both the main strength and primary weakness of the album: sonically, it comes across as remarkably cohesive (a rare feat for a double album), but you also might find yourself skipping over the instrumentals in search of the gems, such as the cover of Pearl Before Swine's "The Jeweller," which alone is worth the price of admission.