This is the fifth album from a British born singer songwriter who moved to France when he was just five years old.
Faccini is a former member of a group called Charley Marlowe but he started a solo career in 2004 and this album which is released on his own label.
He's a visual artist too, something you might guess from the original designs on his websites and lovingly crafted videos using paper silhouettes.
The album title is a translation of a French expression to describe twilight (the time of day, not the vampire books!).
Faccini says :"I wanted to create a large, existential tableau around the subject of love, relationships, sexuality and desire". Nobody could accuse him of lacking ambition!
Unsurprisingly, he has been likened to Nick Drake, not least because the delicate textures of his songs often have the same poetic intensity and introspective reflections.
The path to true love is, as we all know, riddled with self doubt and regret and Faccini speaks of these feelings through his songs. "I want you but I've lost my will", he sings on the opening track Black Rose and he laments of the "three words unsaid" on Missing Words.
The arrangements are always acoustic but far from minimalistic since the songs feature a wide range of instruments including cello, harmonium, kora and double bass.
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In Wide Shut Eyes, a song about solitude, the vocal call and response is echoed in the African and Chinese instrumentation to bring out the pathos of lines like "the ache will fade like the morning mist".
The exotic, cosmopolitan flavour is added by virtue of the fact that one song, Reste la Maree (The remains of the tide) is sung in French while Il Cammino (The Stroll) is in Italian.
Rather like Blake's poems of lost innocence, the joyful odes to love in Faccini's beautifully evocative songs are never entirely free from an almost tragic aura of secrecy and shame.
As such this is recommended listening for incurable dreamers and romantics everywhere.
Piers Faccini's website
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