-Visions of Excess is the title of a collection of essays by the late French writer, bibliophile, cultural critic/anthropologist, and pornographer Georges Bataille. Bataille's work has always been close to Marc Almond's heart, so much so that he's been part of a tribute gig to him released as The Violent Silence. Almond's work as a solo artist apart from Soft Cell has been so wide-ranging and abundant -- wildly careening between post-pop RB, cabaret songs, electronics, classic and kitschy pop, glam, French chanson, disco, and more -- that it embodies the entire notion of "excess." That's far from a bad thing, and though he's missed the mark with his records from time to time, he's never done anything that would be remotely considered untrue to his vision. Each recording has been a snapshot of where Almond as an artist was at the time of any work's creation. Sure, this is a lot to say for a pop singer, but then Scott Walker and Jacques Brel were pop singers, too, as was Lotte Lenya in her native Germany before the Second World War, and it's from this tradition that Almond's work comes. Indeed, his life -- both aesthetic and everyday -- is the stuff of a collection of poems by Paul Verlaine or Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde or Laure, Bataille's gloriously infamous poet lover.

1		I Have Lived
2		I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten
3		Bedsitter Images
4		The London Boys
5		Strangers In The Night
6		The Ballad Of The Sad Young Men
7		Stardom Road
8		Kitsch
9		Backstage (I'm Lonely)
10		Dream Lover
11		Happy Heart
12		Redeem Me (Beauty Will Redeem The World)
13		The Curtain Falls