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If there ever came a time that this scribe was famous enough for someone to be interested in his Desert Island Discs, then first on the list - no question - would be a 1996 album that he and about 30 other people around the world fell in love with.
This is not the time nor the place to effuse about a 10-year old record, but if you ever want to listen to the musical embodiment of beauty, melancholy and longing then desperately seek out the eponymous album made by The Violet Burning.
So who are The Violet Burning? Well, in much the same way that Trent Reznor is Nine Inch Nails, Michael Pritzl is The Violet Burning. Like Reznor, his recorded output is fairly infrequent and the musical moods he creates anything but happy. However, there endeth the similarity for Pritzl's music is far less primal and in amongst the lyrical shadows of depression are sprinkled flecks of hope.
The Violet Burning's seventh proper studio album may be called Drop-Dead but it lacks being Gorgeous only in name. Pritzl's voice is an instrument of mellifluous exquisiteness, which is able to generate an air of aching and vulnerability without sounding fey.
The music's not shabby nor one-dimensional either. Where the likes of Do You Love Me?, Already Gone and Blown Away deal in adrenaline rushing, electronic-inflected guitar rock that Garbage would love to write, The Ends Begin and One Thousand Years are altogether slower-burning. The former is especially wonderful with a tender, tender vocal over a drum loop, synths that sound like distant strings, a stunning melody and a crescendo as guitars are gradually brought in to flesh out the sound.
Elsewhere, Eleanor is big chorus-ed and bold - kind of "college rock" but with a PhD - while dotted throughout are examples of Pritzl indulging his love of The Cure with breathtaking results.
More, for example, starts in the vein of A Forest, with nearly three minutes of percussion and atmospheric instrumentation before Pritzl's vocal bursts in surrounded by swathes of gothic, layered guitar. The memorably melodic Rewind takes the reference even further with dark, industrial swirls and Pritzl imploring "Kiss me, Kiss me" in an Anglicised accent.
Not everything comes off. Opener Humm does not seem to develop beyond its drum loop intro while All I Want and Swan Sea are far-from-bad examples of wistful indie-rock yet not quite as mesmerising as one might wish for.
But such criticisms are trifling in the wider context. When Pritzl asks, "Do you love me? / Do you love me? / Do you love me tonight?" surely in some universe somewhere where justice prevails there are millions of people shouting back, "Yes!" in unison. Make sure you're one of them.
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