Cocteau Twins : Classic or Dud

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

I was a fan at the time as well and I felt the same way as you, but after HoLV. I thought then, and still do now, that HoLV was right up there with the earlier stuff, but FCC was a real nosedive in quality and the rot really set in with M&K.

xp

Heh, for me in the US their deal with Capitol Records meant I could A. buy the album at the nearby mall instead of having to spend all day busing to the cool record stores in Montrose and B. it would only cost $16 instead of $22. I will always have a soft spot for Best Buy because in the early 90s they started selling CDs as loss leaders right when 4AD started their US operation, which meant all the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance back catalog (and new 4AD stuff) was now available on CD for $9-12 an album!

did the change to using english sentences coincide with the major label (and those horrible covers)? not heard BBK for a while (bought on tape...) but in my memory that's the last good lp.

Four-Calendar Cafe was the watershed (heh) album for being able to understand most of what Fraser was singing.

(they were still on 4AD through Heaven or Las Vegas)

I've always considered HOLV to be their peak. Felt like they were finally entering into the (alternative) mainstream, and you could even understand a few of the lyrics ("Las Vegas", something about burning a playhouse down, etc.) I saw them on that tour, with Galaxie 500, and you could kind of sense that both bands were reaching the end of something. Not that I expected much in the way of onstage animation, but both bands seemed unusually morose.

Am I the only one who thought for years that it was actually Tiny Dynamite?

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.

love this story, veronica. i don't have children, but there is something to that connection that i recognize. it's strange to think about - baby vibes. it's definitely not the pooping and the falling over. but maybe instead it's the weirdness of a baby being the dense center of a lifetime of potential emotions and feelings and memories and heartbreak, still waiting to be formed. so the crying, basically

Mark me down as well that Love's Easy Tears and BBK were effectively the end of my real interest at the time, to the point I couldn't be arsed going through to Glasgow to see them touring BBK.

Actually the Harold Budd album might be what broke the back for a lot of people and the obvious high points of BBK weren't enough to win them back?

It probably wasn't until the BBC Sessions came out I realised what I'd missed out on and rediscovered the late era (because listening to them on the radio at the time didn't click).

Irrespective of the reputation it has built since, my memory of the time is that Treasure was considered a bit of a let down - which, since the releases before it were Sunburst & Snowblind and PDD/Spangle Maker maybe isn't that surprising.

Victorialand was the last one for which Vaughan Oliver/23 Envelope did the cover, so that certainly marked the end of something.

amazing to hear these stories from you all. it's so hard to imagine being let down by Treasure, i mean, that's a greatest hits album!

i think i will always hold a special place for Victorialand, because it is incredibly hard to pull off a catchy pop album with no bass

man, not for me re: Treasure, I listened to that thing every day in early 1985

The only stumbling block I initially had re: Treasure is the drum machine. But still, Treasure more than lives up to its name.

I think the biggest criticism was that the sides started and ended well but sagged in the middle? Trying to remember reviews I read once or maybe twice over 35 years ago.

bought the odd cocteau's single during the 80s after hearing 'orange appled' on a melody maker giveaway single. and as much as i liked those, i really rather took them for granted at the time - they were just always there, releasing cocteau twinsy music. not quite enough rough edges for me as a teen. i go in phases with them now, still never heard anything beyond 'heaven or las vegas' though

Also it's hilarious to me that sleeve read about them in MRR.

it was a Tesco Vee column about his favorite records of the moment! also how I got turned on to Swans "Cop", lol

The only stumbling block I initially had re: Treasure is the drum machine.

when i think about it, i think the stumbling block for enjoying their music was also the drums, but not specifically the drum machine (or Treasure), just the 80s drum production in general. the smiths, the replacements, cocteau twins - for a long time i kind of nodded along to all of them but found the production too distracting. at some point, though, several years ago, i finally got used to that sound and it was no longer an obstacle.

and truth be told, a gated drum can sound really good in the right conditions (like the cocteau twins catalog)

my cocteaus origin story is probably not that unique—

was working at a used music store where i was solely responsible for section maintenance of all vinyl stock. i was just turned 20 at the time and had been a hiphop head most of my life. while working my way through the stacks, i would encounter these bands that had rather large sections and which i had never heard of — bands like blue oyster cult, the jam, yes, etc. huge names obviously, but i didn't know them. the cocteaus had one of the largest sections in the whole store and i was mystified by this group i had never even heard of that had a shit ton of records and no photos of the band on any them — what was this??? employees were allowed to use the store's stock as a library of sorts, so before weekends, i'd go into one of these sections and grab six or seven records to listen to on my days off. if i liked them enough, i'd buy two or three of the records and make a mixtape of the highlights of the rest. when i did that with the cocteaus, i think the first thing i put on after getting home that friday night was sunburst and snowblind and i have rarely experienced a feeling like that: a simultaneous feeling of "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS??" and "WHY DO I LIKE THIS????"

good times.

i also worked in a used music store when i was 20, but i was too busy dealing the manager's insistence that kasabian and keane were the best bands of the moment to explore any good music

it was a Tesco Vee column about his favorite records of the moment! also how I got turned on to Swans "Cop", lol

I'm surprised, no shocked, that the guy from screeching weasel didn't write an angry letter of complaint about this