Dark pop: Cocteau Twins: Songs like warm fog

People who look at their feet while making music because looking at their surroundings is too frightening and irritating. And produce the sounds and songs that remove the listener from the world as far as the transmitter and receiver can work together. The Scottish band Cocteau Twins played dream music between 1980 and 1998. Songs like warm fog. Later, other bands added distortion and it was called shoegaze.

Singer Liz Fraser sang in an indistinct manner on the first Cocteau Twins albums. “mouth music” was used as a term to describe this onomatopoeia, which was very rare in pop and still hinted at remnants of meaning construction. “For years, journalists, fans and labels have desperately tried to decipher what Elizabeth Fraser may have sung,” the band’s website proclaims, not without pride.

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With the 1990 album “Heaven or Las Vegas” everything became clearer and more transparent, both voice and music. The following two records were the Cocteau Twins’ last, and they were no longer celebrated very much by the fans. Both “Four Calendar Café” (1993) and “Milk & Kisses” (1996) have now been re-released. When you listen back, the picture is a little more complex. Everything sounds less ethereal and less twisted compared to the canonical songs. You can tell the instruments apart, and the voice floats above everything instead of always disappearing and taking the listener with it on its way into the undefined beyond.

When the fog clears, what’s left are simply structured, very pretty, but not necessarily overwhelming pop songs, which, if they hadn’t been brought into the world by a style-defining British indie band of the 80s and 90s, would have been more likely would have gone unnoticed. But after a gap of 30 years, some beauties reappear. For example, the song “Theft, and Wandering Around Lost” on “Four-Calendar Café”, a very delicate piece musically and vocally. With a text that demands your own strength, from yourself: »My body is my own / My body is mine alone / And I deserve protection / And I can create it for you«. And in the chorus the voice goes up, the lyrical self looks back and asks itself: “Is this what my body said / Use me, drain me, fall around me?” Of course the body didn’t say that, but wanted something different actually. What, of course, remains unclear and blurred.

“Bluebeard” is similarly beautiful and accurate in its description of the relationship. According to guitarist Robin Guthrie, the piece is a country song by the Cocteau Twins. Elizabeth Fraser asks herself things: »Are you safe? Are you my friend? Or are you toxic for me? Will you betray my confidence?” I have no idea whether the term “toxic” was already in use in England in 1993. If not, the Cocteau Twins helped to establish it. The person being sung about here also remains intangible: “This love’s a nameless dream / And healthy boundaries / And how long would you miss me”.

The surprising and ambivalent beauty that the Cocteau Twins were able to bring into the world in their best moments also appears again and again on the band’s last two albums. Not always, unfortunately, but it’s worth the search.

Cocteau Twins: »Four-Calendar Café« (Proper/H’Art)

Cocteau Twins: »Milk & Kisses« (Proper/H’Art)

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