Not only was picking the Cocteau Twins a good choice, on reflection I think the selection of Head over Heels was a great shout too.
These days I don’t play as much of their music as I should do; but when I do, without realising it, I have drifted into focusing on the back end of their catalogue and in particular Heaven and Las Vagas and Four Calendar Café.
I was going to say this was a welcome reminder of their earlier albums, but it was more than that. It made me reappraise which of their albums I liked the most and what it was I really liked about them and for all the commercial friendliness of the later albums this one really does sum up what is good about them.
This album has a denser feel than their later better-known albums and though I might not have consciously thought it before this week, I think it’s better for it. Though there are elements of where they are heading in tracks like Sugar Hiccup, overall it’s a bit denser and has more drive to it. Though it’s quite dense it’s not at all muddied, the layers of sound that Rob was less enamoured with I love, and I also think they are really well knitted together. Garlands was good but this album showed quite how talented Guthrie and Fraser were. I don’t think they had any formal musical training (?) but between them with little support they created something both enduring and significantly ahead of it’s time.
When Benny mentioned them being down the road from him it occurred to me that I don’t really think of them as a Scottish band but equally Liz Fraser vocals are a modern take on the Gaelic tradition of mouth music and for me personally it works brilliantly. If I hear the likes of Karen Matheson or Rhiannon Giddens doing traditional mouth music, I think of Liz Frazer as much as I do anything else so she has definitely left her mark and as I’ve already said I wish she’d not had the challenges that have to some degree curtailed here career.
Though I do have favourite individual tracks such as When Mama Was Moth, Five Ten Fiftyfold, In our Angelhood and Musette and Drum, I don’t think there’s anything on here that lets the side down.
8.5 for the album and an extra 0.5 for getting me to re-evaluate it, relative to the rest of their catalogue.
9/10.