Bitter? Sweet as sugar.

Hot damn, kids, few things are finer than drowning in anticipation for a new album -- six long years in this case if you count a soundtrack release, and I do -- having that album arrive and, most importantly, having that album more than satisfy said anticipation. The sultry-voiced Jill Tracy, last heard here, is back with her new long player, The Bittersweet Constrain, and it's as wonderfully dark and mischievous and mesmerizing as I had hoped, the perfect spell to make one forget, even if just for a moment, about superdelegates and crumbling ice shelves.

Her piano still dominates proceedings the way a lover dominates -- oops, that's another story for another time -- but her backing band, The Malcontent Orchestra, has upped the propulsive thrust of the musical backbone in comparison to her debut, Diabolical Streak, leaving the strings to accent the proceedings and bringing to the fore the cornucopia of percussion heard on Into the Land of Phantoms, the aforementioned instrumental soundtrack to F. W. Murnau's silent horror classic Nosferatu, thus luring the songs with an amorous kiss out of a turn-of-the-century cabaret and its table of forlorn green fairies and through the fog for a rendez-vous in a smoky, noirish jazz club caught in the dark cloak of a nearby hotel that's seen and heard everything under the moon.

The lyrics still spin twilight tales of spurned love, untimely ends and thoughts lost in the shadows, slowly creeping unseen and meaning to not merely embrace, but drag us down into those oh-so-wrong exalted states. Go on, wear the masque of shock at their devious plan, but do you really want to fight it? Thought not. I suppose that I could name some 'highlights' -- the hypnotic languor of lead track Haunted by the Thought of You, the sinister longing of Sell My Soul, the sordid delicacy of Room 19, the seductively sardonic Torture -- but I've always been an album guy, so sitting down with nary a weak track and sleepwalking in daydream through all sixty-one minutes is the only way to listen. What a bloody good record. I need a smoke.