Cocteau Twins : Classic or Dud

"Ice-Blink Luck" A-side is on HOLV but everything before that is EP-only

nice! i will probably be listening to this tonight at some point, thanks! :)

i only have Heaven or Las Vegas and Stars and Topsoil on LP. i have a feeling the next few months are going to be expensive, but i gotta get all this shit

karl, the ep’s are so, so good. love’s easy tears is sometimes my favorite release of theirs. an exquisite 15 minutes of music.

the two releases i first heard way back when i listened to music obsessively on tapes: the tiny dynamine ep and the pink opaque comp. i still get wistful goosebumps when i revisit them.

completely agree that the lullabies to violaine comp is essential.

ok, i'm listening now. i'm such a sucker for motorik ("feathers oars-blades"). are these chronological? i assume this is 1981. the influence of motorik is everywhere but i'm trying to think of another 1981 track that carries the torch so well

yeah the EPS are necessary.. but the sound on lullabies to violaine is kinda ass-y

I hiked to the actual Blue Bell Knoll a few months ago :D
While she was in Europe I'd go through my sister's tape collection for driving music cause my car only had a tape deck yet I had hardly any tapes. Chose 4 Calendar Cafe and drove around to it on the 1st nice day of Spring. Perfect soundtrack, I fell in love. Sis also had Heaven or Las Vegas which I also borrowed and loved, and Treasure which for some reason I only liked one song on. In college, Milk and Kisses was ubiquitous in record shops but I heard it wasn't very good so never bought it. Figured they were one of those bands who had a couplefew albums that really clicked with me and that's all.
Fast forward to a couple years ago when I signed up for streaming services and their earlier albums would come up in suggestions or playlists, causing a mindblown.gif reaction in me. Not only was there a bunch more stuff of theirs that I liked (ie literally everything else I hadn't heard) but I liked much of it more than the stuff I'd already known (or at least liked it as much).

I hiked to the actual Blue Bell Knoll a few months ago :D

i didn't know it was a real place, so any details would be gobbled up, by me

"from the flagstones"!

love this one.

i think gated drums were a big issue for me, for a while. not sure when that stopped, but it's been a long time, and now the effect feels as otherworldly as i imagine it must have seemed at the time

yeah Lullabies to Violaine has terrible mastering, go with the Pink Opaque it's their best comp

did their original releases sound good, at least? i should probably make sure i don't accidentally purchase an OG copy of a poorly mastered record

yes, they sound great - this is the way to go IMO:

https://www.discogs.com/Cocteau-Twins-Cocteau-Twins-Singles-Collection/master/5467

the original vinyl and CD releases sound great, the CD remasters are a little hot but not terrible and frankly they fucked up Lullabies to Violaine... no clue about any reissued vinyl

^^ yeah, and on the plus side I bet original CD versions of those singles are cheap

honestly, the reissue of Heaven and Las Vegas that i have seems to be panned by everyone for having absolutely disastrous sound. i guess i blew my ears out playing drums in a concrete basement, growing up, but it still sounds fucking amazing to me. so i'm not too nitpicky

some of the greatest musical moments of my life have been in extremely poor listening circumstances, whether that was listening to a release in mitigated circumstances or listening to an amazing live performance in the middle of a push and pull of bodies

The Spangle Maker: FUCK YEAH

well that came out of nowhere from the end. jfc. i love you all <3

The Spangle Maker: FUCK YEAH

otm

was the spangle maker not on treasure? it's from 1984? what, they're just releasing the spangle maker as a non-album single like it's no big deal? wtf

they have a ton of non-album material!

i don't deserve this. none of us deserve this

The Spangle Maker EP has Pearly Dewdrops' Drops on it!

wow, you haven't heard Love's Easy Tears yet, have you... it's not on Stars and Topsoil

Blue Bell Knoll is on Boulder Mtn in southern Utah, a little above 11000 feet. Feels a bit out of place since you have this enormous high plateau surrounded by your typical southern Utah rocky desert. I planned to hike to Blind Lake, and once I got there I looked at my GPS map and noticed Blue Bell Knoll was on top of the ridge behind the lake. I also had no idea it was a real place until that moment! Honestly the lake was much prettier than the knoll itself, but for their names it's vice versa. I think I read that nobody in the band has gone up there, they just read the name somewhere and liked the sound of it.

Is there a reason they released so much non-LP stuff?

The 80s was an era where bands released a lot of EPs

I suppose. They seem to have more than most. Maybe it's just that they have more quality non album output. Or that other bands active in the 80s that I listen to are the anomaly for having so little.

The UK seemed to care more about singles than albums in the 80s, too... so many US versions of 80s UK albums included a single that wasn't originally on it but was released around the same time (ie the US version of Meat is Murder with How Soon is Now? on it, or PC&L getting Blue Monday added)

wow, you haven't heard Love's Easy Tears yet, have you... it's not on Stars and Topsoil

don't think so! it's coming up in another 11 songs or so, though

tbh, though, i have trouble remembering a lot of their song titles. every single one is so bonkers

this narrative is probably too shaped by my own music preferences, but it always seemed like US bands recorded singles only because they couldn't afford to release an album yet, while for UK bands the single was more of an end it itself and they would happily continue releasing them (look at New Order) ... by no means universally true, but it feels that way

xpost

hello pre-Love's Easy Tears Karl Malone

i don't know if this is building it up too much, but i'm going to take a hike to a mountaintop and do some shrooms in the next 50 minutes, and when it gets to Love's Easy Tears i'm going to get ready to level up

For me the EPs+Victorialand are the core/heart music in the stretch between Lullabies and BBK. The EPs are beyond essential, along with this astonishing track (collected in the box, otherwise compilation only)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgv08gsexfc

i can't believe i'm about to listen to a second track with the word "spangle" in it, on the same comp

you're in the butterfly period... they recorded those EPs to test out their new studio, and weren't originally planning to release them!

my first "Love's Easy Tears" thoughts are that i think i've heard it before! but what's crazy is that i'm not sure if i've heard the real thing or if i've heard the echos of it in other CT songs. but it instantly feels familiar, and an instant favorite for sure

enjoy your new spells!

There was a period in the 80s where bands felt it was ripping fans off to load albums with songs from singles/eps they'd already paid for. Instead they just made more stuff we had to buy!

> The UK seemed to care more about singles than albums in the 80s, too...

i think there's more to it than that - these were very specifically EPs. so you got more music than a 7" single and, importantly given it's 4ad / v23, full size art. and Tiny Dynamine and Echoes in a Shallow Bay were released just two weeks apart - were designed as eps rather than a single album.

i had almost exactly none of them* before the box was released so that was ideal for me. but when i ripped all my cds to flac i overlooked the box completely because it was too fat to shelve with the others.

(* i had the Pearly 7" from years previous and had also bought, i think, iceblink luck that was the most recent release at the time)

Wow, this thread got real good last night, huh. Congratulations on your journey, KM. One of the few musical points of consensus among me and my gf and other musical heads of my acquaintance is that Cocteau Twins are one of the best bands ever, very possibly the best.

Don't sleep on the BBC Sessions! Something of that nature is generally very sleeponable wrt most musical acts but there are versions of songs in that collection which I unaccountably love even more than the studio versions. And yes, all of the EPs are absolutely essential.

I came to the conclusion a few years back that 'Love's Easy Tears' is my favorite of their songs. There's fierce competition but I haven't wavered yet.

The very very tangentially Cocteaus-adjacent band I became obsessed with somewhat recently is Mahogany, which has the Cocteaus-esque distinction of being an act whose discography I've played front-to-back on numerous occasions (an experience I get something fresh + new from every time).

Back in the day (mid 80s) I had heard the name and seen some EPs in a record store in the big city of 200 000 people - I grew up in a rural part of Tasmania which is quite like Vancouver Island for you North Americans. Anyway I bought Tiny Dynamine and when I had picked my jaw off the floor I slowly bought as much of their stuff as I could. BBK was the first new album to come out after I became a fan and of course very hard to find at the far end of the earth (literally). As I pieced it all together the hardest one to find was Love’s Easy Tears and I’ve often wondered if that’s why I liked it the most - interesting to hear the other praise here.
When the EP box came out I had 80% of it on vinyl, but of course CD was the “best” and I sold the vinyl cheap to my friend and spent a week’s rent on the box. Still got it, still glad I bought it (some of the vinyl pressings were terrible).

I'm struggling to remember how I even discovered them. I know Heaven or Las Vegas and Treasure were used bin blind buys around the same time but I can't remember why I was prompted to blind buy them in the first place. At any rate, it was right around the time they released Milk and Kisses so my timing in becoming a Cocteaus fan was quite excellent.

I bought Blue Bell Knoll when it came out, based on a (positive) review I read (I wanna say in the Village Voice?) that described the album as "avant-garde brunch music" or something like that. I just had to see for myself.

like Karl, I always dug 'em when I heard 'em during their prime, but I had a somewhat ill-advised disinclination to listen to english college rock, as I found Depeche Mode/Smiths/ Cure people to be objectionable at the time. And in '94, a coworker at a label I worked for played FCC in the office a lot, and many of those songs stayed with me…

But four years ago, I thought "I'm gonna really check 'em out." And so, during the final year and a half of 30 years as a New York resident, and in the first year of my daughter's life, Cocteaus was key. Evidently Fraser held her and Guthrie's baby while she was recording "Heaven…" and probly going up this thread, I think there is a post from me talking about watching kids gambol in Prospect park while listening to that song or the whole album, thinking that my child is going to do that in a couple years. And one night, I was at the Adirondack bar in windsor terrace with a pal who also likes 'em, and "Iceblink Luck" came on, and goddamn did that sound right…

I got Stars and Topsoil and I noticed that "Orange Appled" has this bell ornamentation that sounds just like that on "Do they Know it's xmas"…must be a synclavier sound… and you guys have reminded that I wanted to listen to Milk and Kisses, which I am doing as I write… pleasant but it does seem they were over it…

I heard "Wax And Wane" on the radio and got Head Over Heels and Sunburst as birthday or Christmas presents in late 1983, Treasure was the first one to come out where I was fully on board and I remember actually reading about it in Maximum Rock And Roll!

Given how sui generis and ahead of their time (or outside of time altogether) they still sound, I can't imagine what it must've been like to have been a contemporaneous fan.

it's funny but Love's Easy Tears and then BBK are what made me lose interest at the time, I only picked up the post-Victorialand records in the last 20 years.

Blue Bell Knoll is still, and will forever be, my favourite CT album ever. And if I absolutely gun-to-head had to pick one song, it'd be 'Itchy Glowbo Blow'.

This is such a bittersweet thing, because I think of this band as so much a band with a watershed.

And I'm kind of jealous of people who come to them as 'getting the whole discography all at once' so they don't have to experience them in a watersheddy way, they can just be "ah, all this stuff is so great!" and see it as a complete set.

Because to me, it was just so much, at the time, like Blue Bell Knoll felt like the end of something. Half of it was amazing - the singles (which I think came out as e.p.s earlier?) were amazing. And the rest of it was so underwhelming. And from then on, they weren't the same band, and it pains me to listen to anything after Love's Easy Tears.

(Maybe this is teenage tribalism, and I should just get over it - like, before BBK they were a weird 4AD band that me and my weird gothy friends loved; and after BBK like my brother and his yuppie mates all got into them and that was awful. I shouldn't hold it against them that their audience changed? But at the same time, every time I play Lullabies to Violane, there is a definite point where I have to get up and stop the music. Oh god I feel like the hater at a love-in now.)

But during that period in the mid-80s when they were amazing, and had such an extraordinary run of fantastic e.p.s and albums, they were utterly untouchable, there was nothing in the world as beautiful as what they did.

I'm glad someone else besides me can hear a difference in the post-Victorialand material

I like it all now (especially HOLV, my god) but at the time it seemed less focused, like some of the edges had been smoothed out