245. Cocteau Twins, "Heaven or Las Vegas"

 


Cocteau Twins is one of those bands that has always rested on the shady periphery for me; I mean, obviously I knew that they existed and I vaguely knew they were influential on the shoegaze/dreampop scene, and I knew the title of this album but I have to confess I had never sat down and listened to it before and you know what?  This is a beautiful album.

It starts with Robin Guthrie's guitar, a chimy, chorusy sound, chugging chords, and then Elizabeth Fraser's voice, but just calling it her "voice" really is an understatement.  Not only does she have incredible range, which she shows off on that first song; it's also got an otherworldly quality that carries through the whole album.  It's no wonder that the genre this spawned is called "dreampop;" the whole album sounds like the soundtrack to a dream.

After a few listens, I kept coming back to "Iceblink Luck," a perfect little jewel box of a song that shows off everything about this band.


I guess I didn't know this but Fraser is famous for having indecipherable lyrics?  It pains me to think about all the disaffected kids who had to wait for the Internet to find out that the lyrics to the title track include:

Carnivals are bluster loud
I'm dizzy so I go under the 'Big Dipper'
Cum fantasy for a carnival
How fitting before a wedding
Singing of a famous street
I want to love, I've all the wrong glory
But is it Heaven or Las Vegas?
But you're much more brighter than the sun is to me

Wild, man.  The band's story is kind of a heartbreaking one.  Guthrie and Fraser were together, had a kid (Lucy Belle, who is now making music not dissimilar from her parents'), and had a messy breakup.  Guthrie, for his part, had a crippling cocaine addiction that apparently pulled the whole band down.  They had a lucrative reunion offer, including the requisite Coachella appearance, a few years back but Fraser said she couldn't be on the stage with Guthrie.  Maybe she'll reconsider; there are a lot of Gen Xers with platinum cards out there now who I'm sure would pay whatever they want.

It's too bad they can't give it another go, but leaving this album behind is a fair enough gift to the world.  I'm glad I found it, finally.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Uh, yes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip...
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g...
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th...
Read more