For all these derivations, however, Life After Defo convinces, its downcast, sweet-bleak beauty becoming more individual with every play.
After the social satire of "A Quiet Family," he stayed with comedy, though in a more personal vein, in "The Foul King" (2000), an alternately sweet and bleak tale about a man who fails as a bank clerk but finds success of a sort as a professional-wrestling villain.
In the 1980's, as half of Eurythmics with Dave Stewart, Ms. Lennox sang about love as a maze of joys and deceptions, sweet dreams and bleak dissension, setting her sultry voice against cool, dispassionate synthesizer tones.
Sweet yet bitter; funny yet bleak; warm yet austere.
This isn't one for anyone who abhors tweeness, but its sweet nature helps to brighten bleak midwinter.
With bleak whimsy and sweet sadness, Perillo's poetry — a body of work spanning more than 20 years — celebrates a world that often hurts her.
With bleak whimsy and sweet sadness Perillo offers what perspective she can on a life that sent her as a young woman from a ranger station to a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis.
Other factors, such as nationalism, religion, technology, also changed the social view of winter from being portrayed as "bleak and bitter to sweet and sublime".
Winters are long and bleak, the summers short but sweet.
But the mood is curiously somber, at times almost harsh, and an aftertaste of bleak resignation lingers after the sweet perfume of romanticism has evaporated.
In a particularly bleak year, the music being made was sweet and homesick.
