Review of Lullabies to Violaine
- By Nitsuh Abebe
- Pitchfork
- 29-Mar 2006
Of all the acts to have circulated through the list of my personal favorites, the Scottish band Cocteau Twins have always been the one that’s impressed me most. This is because their music, at its best, offers nearly everything I want out of pop records.
The list of things I want is long and complicated (I hope), but start with just this one abstract thing: This band is absolutely unique in its vision and sound, and yet that uniqueness is an integral part of creating something beautiful. That’s rarer than you might think. The things that are special and adventurous here aren’t competing with beauty and accessibility. Neither are they merely coexisting with them—they’re actually the same things. The Cocteaus’ best songs seem to be creating whole new sorts of beauty and energy, from scratch, and something about that gets to the root of what a lot of us want music to do in the first place.
Like a lot of UK bands of their era, much of that terrific Cocteau work was released on EPs. In fact, the band made terrific use of the format, giving each 12” a distinct aesthetic, from the sound to the cover art to the song titles. For a long time, the only way to access that work on CD was a maroon box filled with 10 individual discs. It wasn’t efficient, but it may have been the right way to appreciate it—pulling out coherent, individual pieces, seeing the art, figuring out what each one had to say. Lullabies to Violaine is a lot more economical. It updates the span, running from 1982’s Lullabies to 1996’s Violaine (get it?), and it packages everything neatly on four discs to be sold in sets of two. (A limited-edition box of all four is also available.) The first set covers the band’s years with 4AD, the “arty” London label whose aesthetic they did a great deal to define; the less-essential (but easy to like) second set covers their years with Mercury and Capitol. This means there is a whole career in here, as told in releases that always felt like miniature albums; for those who’ve skipped these, it’s something like finding an alternate discography full of prime-era records.
The first disc tells the best part of the story. When they started in the early 1980s, the Cocteau Twins were possibly a little strange: a vaguely gothic post-punk act with a drum machine, some oddly processed guitars, ambitious song titles, and a keening, fluttery, operatic (and totally unintelligible) singer. They were scrappy and shadowy, definitely gritty and definitely human. But fairly early on, they began to bring something very un-punk out of their music: They started filling their songs with nods at grand, classicist beauty, with sounds people couldn’t help associating with baroque arts and pre-Raphaelite oil paintings. They began to sound like someone had sent a punk band on a time-traveling tour of European cathedrals—and the punk band had somehow managed to live up to it, standing there and forcing out something fittingly gorgeous, something that actually kind of sounded like Caravaggio.
Better yet, that atmosphere wasn’t just cribbing from classical-music cues and baroque imagery: There was an incredible amount of sheer invention happening. On this first disc, post-punk takes flight: “Feathers Oar Blades” is a kind of new-wave dance unlike anything else, “Sugar Hiccup” launches into that swooning music for cathedrals, “The Spangle Maker” is both stirring and atmospheric. With the best tracks here, you can actually hear the effort in the songs: The band seems to be still standing in the post-punk basement, actually forcing something beautiful into existence down there between the cinder blocks. You can also hear them creating new sounds with each chronological EP. Elizabeth Fraser discovers her voice; along with Björk, she’s one of the best available arguments that acts like this can offer unusual vocal styles every bit as stirring and technically remarkable as any other genre. She learns how to multi-track her melodies into the interlocking hooks they’d later perfect; guitarist Robin Guthrie sorts out the grand wall of swooshing guitars (and effects) that would match them. Listening through these EPs on the same disc really does make the genuine b-level material stand out a bit more; pulling individual discs out of that maroon box, one tended to be distracted by the number of precious tracks. And fans will be disappointed to hear that the “alternate versions” of a few songs included here just sound wrong and ahistorical, even though that’s how Guthrie wanted them in the first place. But there are plenty of precious things here—more than most anything on your shelf.
Disc two is the age of riches: Having broken through to a distinctive sound, the Cocteaus set about broadening it, cleaning it up, learning where it might lead. On Tiny Dynamine they learn how to float—“Pink Orange Red” is a bigger, more awe-inspiring cathedral (and one of their absolute best tracks), and the remainder of the EP cruises along into the chilly, delicate comforts of the future. Echoes in a Shallow Bay is darker and more turbulent, bringing back a drum-machine stomp and that hard, keening lower register of Fraser’s voice. (This is beauty that frightens—something that winds through a lot of Cocteau work, and surely accounts for some of those old-religion metaphors.) And the very-solid Love’s Easy Tears may sit at the dead center of the entire Cocteau oeuvre.
The part of their career that’s missing is the one best represented by albums. As time went on, being beautiful wasn’t even a strain anymore: If the Treasure LP has that taking-flight quality, then Blue Bell Knoll (the darker one) and Heaven or Las Vegas (the fluffier one) are just effortlessly dreamy. But eventually they began to seem a little too comfortable. The course of their career was like an airplane flight: There was the magic of watching them lift off the dirty runway and take wing, and there was the magic of breaking above the clouds and looking at a dreamworld, but after a while of coasting up there, the sun and clouds were just scenery.
The funny thing about listening through discs three and four, though, is that the material doesn’t feel as much like the slide it did at the time; some of it is even prettier, more confident, more consistent, and still awfully adventurous. The title track of 1993’s Evangeline EP (also an album track) is a peak of spooky comfort, with a vibe something like Julee Cruise’s Twin Peaks songs, and after that come rare, much-loved Cocteau versions of “Winter Wonderland” and “Frosty the Snowman.” By the end of the disc we’ve reached what once felt like the Twins’ back-looking period, with the acoustic versions of older tracks on Twinlights. They’re terrific listening, and disc four kicks off with something that’s anything but backward—the stunning Otherness EP, on which the band took up the ambient-techno format people had always said their music had a kinship with. It’s with Tishbite that the band begins to feel a little like a fluffed-up, tooth-extracted, or just point-repeating version of its former self. But that’s something that—when you’re listening through a compilation, and not eagerly awaiting an album—doesn’t even seem so bad.
That first volume—the 4AD years—still feels incredible: It’s like watching geological action, where amidst a whole lot of dirty rumbling, brand-new awe-inspiring peaks burst up out of the earth. The second volume is like returning to those peaks and finding them fleshed out with trees and flowers and a visitors’ station—more inviting, but not so much where the action is. With either one, though, this is a spot it’s worth visiting. It’s very easy to treat this band as an aberration or a cul-de-sac, a lone act with its own particular schtick. But don’t forget that—just as much as every band that pushed along a movement, inspired a whole genre, or did something else historically pivotal—this act really created something. (Volume I: 8.5 out of 10; Volume 2: 7.8 out of 10) ▣
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