Check out the great review of our new album! "Get Lost In Colour" -- "The Ice March" CD Review by Chrissi Sepe Psychedelic band Colour (guitarist/vocalist Dave Echo and drummer/bassist Damian Scro) have released a new CD entitled "The Ice March." Colour's music is a cross between 1980's Cure and what was the best of early 1990's alternative music. "The Ice March" contains so many different elements: feedback, distortion, even borderline heavy metal while never losing sight of its dreamy vocals. There are tasteful guitar solos with beautiful melodic changes, funky bass, even 1970's style keyboard effects that sound like vibes or xylophone. This is an album you don't just listen to, you live inside of it. You become submerged in Colour's world, and each instrumental line and lyric plays a different character. Their song "The Filtered Life," which is featured towards the end of the CD, contains lyrics that illustrate this point: "Get lost in the orange skies/Purple night/Get lost in the crowd/No one's around/We're the only ones that can hear our sound"; and into the chorus: "I need no one but you/I need no one else at all." As you listen to "The Ice March," you are in your own world and you don't need anyone or anything else while listening to it. "The Ice March" opens with the track "Crystallize," and seconds after I put my headphones on, I was immediately transported to a bar in the early 1990's, watching a live alternative band, swaying to the music. I found this song intoxicating in this early night bar scene feel. It's a good thing I was on my feet at this bar, because in minutes, I was listening to Track #2, "Soldier of Dreams," which has the bass line in front and a vocal line I could march to: "Have you seen the soldier of dreams?/The sky is colder/He's grown older." The trippy lyrics and keyboard effects completely drew me in. "It's all over/ The world is over." The hypnotic feel continues with "Visualize." The chorus repeats the title of the track, but instead I chanted "Hyp-no-tize," because that's how I felt! This song is one of my favorites on the CD. The music is beautiful, but it is contrasted by sad, simple lyrics. Kind of like a Banana Yoshimoto novel where the story is sad, but there is always a glimmer of hope in the deceptively simple prose. In this case, it is the music that is the glimmer of hope as the vocal line sings: "All of the best laid plans fall into the ground." Speaking of falling, Side B opens with a track of that very same name. As soon as "Falling" began, I fell down into the rabbit hole with Alice. With each drum beat, down the rabbit hole I went. There is a buzz, the words "tumbling down," the tempo of the music picks up, and as she really gets scared about where she'll land, the music gets a little faster and then fades out. But once I fell, I didn't find myself in a children's storybook because in two more tracks, I heard a pulsating beat, a cool guitar solo (that could have almost come from a keyboard reminiscent of The Cure), and I was back in a bar, but this time it felt like the one where that 1980's Michael J. Fox movie, "Bright Lights, Big City," takes place. The song is called "Purple Submerges." "And so life runs over you," the lyrics say. This is not a fast song, but something about the hazy confusion in it reminded me of one of the early scenes in that movie, where Michael J. Fox is trapped in a world that he feels completely swept in by the environment around him. Lyrics feature heavily throughout the majority of "The Ice March." On some tracks, the vocals are hidden and fuzzy, in others they are clear and easily decipherable, front and center. There is even a canned vocal effect on Track #5, "Clear," which also has a really great, funky guitar solo at the end. But as "The Ice March" comes to a close, it is the instruments who become the central characters of this world. Track #10, the title track of the CD, begins with a weird bass sound and chimy sound effects, then has stripped down instruments which make this track like two songs in one. We don't hear any lyrics until seven minutes into the song, but when they do come in, it's worth the wait: "I can see angels through the glass." The final track on the CD is called "Still." This song is a complete instrumental. It begins with a long feedback buzz, into guitar, and the intro reminds me of that Pop Will Eat Itself classic, "Sweet, Sweet Pie." This song goes from one ear to the other into the headphones, all instrumental distortion, straight buzz and feedback until the end of the CD. That last buzz and feedback is the saddest part of the CD because then you are no longer in "The Ice March's" world. But happily, all you have to do is press play again, and you are instantly back in that 1990's alternative music bar, swaying to the beat of the music. This is the 5 release from this noise pop shoegaze band. It is a new-old album! It dates back to the winter of ‘06 and it was called ”The Ice March”. This was the period of time in-between the bands 2nd album “The Dark Year” and their 3rd “Heaven”. It was never released because is was completed right at the time Damian Scro switched to drums from bass and the band were changing the sound a bit. So this is the album that never was. Fans of Colour’s more dreamy Slowdive sounding songs and their heavily influenced Cure numbers will enjoy this selection of wall of colour noise. This record also houses some of the most insane guitar feedback noise ever produced and features never performed tracks like “Lifeless” from the Dark Year sessions, when the band were hooked on The Cure’s “One Hundred Years” off the Pornography record. So let us all get lost in the lush guitar mist that surrounded all these early recordings on the new (old) album, “THE ICE MARCH” -The Blurry World Record Co.