Review from Vox, November 1997

BILLY MACKENZIE
Beyond The Sun
Final work from Associates mainman

Billy Mackenzie is no longer with us. That our last memory of him will be an album of stark melancholic beauty seems a wholly apt mirror to the heartbreakingly fragile laments that form the nucleus of 'Beyond The Sun'. It's darkly unnerving and beautifully bleak, the sound of a troubled man reaching deep inside himself to bare the elegant wasteland of his soul.

'Winter Academy' is tender heartbreak, a quietly twisted Nick Drake-like ballad, while 'And This She Knows' is lit up by his haunting voice. It's terribly ironic that in death he has finally found the voice that in life he struggled to locate. It magnificently illuminates ten songs that bear all the hallmarks of greatness and the tear strains of tradegy. Truly a bittersweet symphony. * * * * *

David Owens