Review: Head Over Heels

• By Simon Reynolds
• Pitckfork.com
• 21-Jan 2024

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1983 masterpiece whose sumptuous sonics and ecstatic approach to songwriting brought post-punk into a mysterious world beyond words.

In the beginning, I didn’t get on at all with Cocteau Twins. When Head Over Heels came out in October 1983, BBC radio DJ John Peel played the entire album on his show. Listening that night in my student room, the wispiness and warbling rubbed me the wrong way.

I decided to give the record another chance after reading a rave review in the NME. Suddenly, I had the key to the secret garden. What had first felt bombastic and hollow became cavernous, like stepping inside a grotto glistening with stalactites. The insubstantiality of the guitar sound, initially so frustrating, became intoxicating, like a heady fragrance. As for that wuthering voice: this was simply the sprite that would inhabit such a wonderland, singing in an alien tongue as impassioned as it was incomprehensible.

Head Over Heels is the perfect title for this record. You’re not meant to cogitate or extract profound literal meaning from these sounds, as was the case with so much post-punk in the immediately prior years. You’re supposed to tumble into its cascading bliss.

“Head over heels” also describes the state of mind of its makers, guitarist Robin Guthrie and singer Elizabeth Fraser. Guthrie has described it as an album of love songs. If so, they are veiled and opaque, hints glinting out now and then in a stray song title (“My Love Paramour”) or rare intelligible lyric (“There’s only a hair’s breadth between us”). Mostly, the feeling comes across non-verbally, as it does almost always with Fraser’s singing, through the swoony elation of her voice.

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