Trials of eyeliner : the anthology 1979/2016

"Stunning ten-disc career survey from pop's dark star - Trials Of Eyeliner is a boxset in three movements. For the populist, there are three discs compiling most of Almond's singles. Scrolling through these discs, you're constantly reminded of the power the pop single once had to seduce. Those early Soft Cell singles, for example, are still engagingly weird".

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"On the surface, Marc Almond might be an unlikely candidate to warrant a ten-disc, career-spanning box treatment. For many, he is best known as half of '80s synth pop outfit Soft Cell (along with David Ball); their biggest hit, "Tainted Love," and its video were synonymous with vintage MTV. (In England their run was more substantive and lasted through 1984.) Post-Soft Cell, Almond's career spiraled off into a dazzling variety of directions with sometimes deft, sometimes daft albums that moved through erotic torch songs, Jean Genet-inspired hustler's balladry, Brechtian cabaret, elegant chanson, Russian-inspired folk and orchestral theater music, pop standards, and industrial abstract experiments in covers and originals. This massive set represents that depth and breadth, dripping all the while with eros, dark, wry humor, and vulnerable emotion ... Trials of Eyeliner offers dazzling and exhaustive evidence of Almond's compulsive creativity. It's more than any casual fan could -orwould - embrace, but this isn't for them. Instead, it's the unholy grail for obsessives who embrace all of Almond's musical contradictions and celebrate his pop iconoclasm. As such, and on many other fronts, it succeeds in spades".

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