You know what this is? In the 1089 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, this is the mid-point. 544 albums lie behind us. 544 albums lie ahead of us. This is it, friends, we have reached the summit and it’s downhill all the way from here. And in a deeply annoying lack of symmetry, there’s one more album for 1984.
In terms of listening time, I don’t recall exactly when I started (maybe I should have kept notes [Edit September 2024 I think]) but I think it’s been about a year for me since I started [Edit: Yes]. In publication terms it’s been a little over a year and a half, so expect the same again. Assuming the usual pack of weak little men haven’t blown us all up by then, expect to see the end some time in 2028. That sounds like the future.
Talking of sounding like the future: The Cocteau Twins. I used to own Heaven Or Las Vegas, a later album that I believe is also on the list. This, their third studio album, is where their sound really solidifies into the dreamscape of spacy instrumentalism that starts from a Cure/Echo kind of place but moves into a more ambient arena, over the top of which Elizabeth Fraser utters breathy indistinct vocals, out of which recognisable words sometimes rise to give a strange Impressionist type of music.
I have heard the track Lorelei before – not the same as the Tom Tom Club track of the same name, but both haunting in their own way as befits a song about a siren of the Rhine. Mythological names continue in the tracks Pandora and Persephone, although when combined with the other names these are more like the children of an upper-middle class family from the 1920s – Cicely, Aloysius, Beatrix, Amelia. The kind who have a nanny to usher them into the nursery for tea.
It’s impossible with a Cocteau Twins track to discuss what it’s about. Fraser’s lyrics often include invented words and are generally tone-poems at best - “Hey, ever dirge, even their moth got a jar” from Persephone, for example. This is a very different track with an almost industrial level pounding backing track, and Fraser’s vocals are more emphatic than her usual ethereal soprano, carrying an Eastern Europe keening, also reminded me of Faroese singer Eivor. The track Cicely has a similarly percussive backing, but this provides a nice counterpoint to a more lilting vocal from Fraser. Otterley marries both music and vocals to a spacy and ... the word you have to keep using is “ethereal” sounds to a track that evokes feelings of floating. And it’s on that juxtaposition than The Cocteau Twins hang their appeal; this is music to be experienced and immersed in, to create a mood rather than to tell a story, and for me it really works.
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