“Ooh, Baby”
- By Mat Snow
- NME/New Musical Express
- 12-Apr 1986
A Pre-Raphaelite beauty sweeps through trailing fronds and hothouse blooms…
Cossack horsemen ride imperiously through the golden gates of Kiev…
A tiny girl playfully tosses a lily into the lake: Boris Karloff’s Monster smiles at her kindness…
Stained-glass sunlight bathes a chorister’s upturned face; a melancholy tear rolls down Mahler’s withered cheek…
I strut around my room, arms waving with Teutonic punctilio; my head explodes into a million incandescent fireflies…
Just what is it about The Cocteau Twins that has them booming around the cranial vaults of a generation for whom Tangerine Dream are sinister agents of social control and Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ the work of the very Devil?
That word echoes…
Cocteau music resounds with the echoes of the distant and exotic. Images shimmer tantalisingly, images of the pure, the hymnal, the unreal. Wonderland—and that’s only the surface. Cocteaus go deeper and purer still—into the elements of water and air. Their tunes sound recorded in a deserted swimming baths, full of echoing space and dappled light. Water and air. THe Cocteau Twins’ oceanic trance music plumbs the deepest feelings because it idealises the most primal experience.
Birth.
That massive treated bass drum is nothing less than a mother’s heartbeat. The swirl of abstracted voice and flanged guitars recall the warm envelope of the womb’s amniotic fluid. Liz Fraser emobides both Ur-mother and universal child…
Hey, 2001: A Space Odyssey!
Liz Fraser sings against the female-victim stereotype. She seldom sounds intimidated by all that cavernous sound closing in on her: she is in harmony with it, part of its natural process. Thus do The Cocteau Twins recreate the unstressed aquatic birth as championed by French natal specialist Dr. Leboyer. His mothers calmly give birth in swimming-pools. And his methods find use in psychotherapy for the disturbed, many of whom prove to have been originally traumatised by difficult births. The sufferer crawls from a room faintly suffused with red light and aqueous heartbeat sounds through a dark tunnel into a relaxed and hospitable ‘delivery-room.’ The sufferer is thus reborn and, results show, all the better for it.
The Cocteau Twins are similar psychic balm, both for those unfortunate enough to have been dropped by the stork or suckled by wolves, and also, more pseudo-sociologically, for that generation first welcomed from childhood to the world of teen-listening by punk’s violent forceps-delivery.
‘Victorialand’ is the most refined Cocteau music to-date, the most diaphonous and airy. Gone is the hint of breach-birth agony as alarmingly pierced as, say, ‘Quisquose.’ Gone, too, is the thudding heartbeat drum; that pulse is now sublimated into the very swell of the music. Gone even is most of yesteryear’s electronic haze: the now largely acoustic Cocteaus evoke a more natural world—a Greek hillside, an English country garden. And in Lewis Carroll vein, the whimsy burbles intact in those song titles—‘Whales Tails,’ ‘Fluffy Tufts,’ even a ‘How to Bring a Blush to the Snow.’
Indeed, this is New Age Music for those who sneer at New Age Music. And I blush to admit I love it. ▣