Cocteau Twins: “Milk & Kisses”

• By Joel McIver
• Record Collector
• 24-Jan 2024

Seventeen years and eight albums into their careers, Grangemouth’s Cocteau Twins were on excellent creative form in 1996, issuing Milk & Kisses without giving a damn that most of the public were listening to Britpop, house music and the tail-end of grunge. Like all of their albums since the mid-80s, the Cocteaus’ sound was based on Liz Fraser’s startling, operatic vocals and shimmering layers of guitar from Robin Guthrie, although critics struggled—just as they always had—to describe the music without drowning in flowery adjectives.

It’s still hard not to go over the top with the ol’ prose when defining the songs, which in the case of Milk & Kisses have now been reissued on 140g vinyl after a remaster by Guthrie some years back. The two singles, “Tishbite” and “Violaine,” were and remain more or less the most accessible songs on the record, the former led by an instantly infectious melody from Fraser and the latter anchored by Simon Raymonde’s stately dub bassline, but there’s equally compelling stuff elsewhere. “Treasure Hiding” is downbeat and subtle, before expanding into a fully-leaded anthem in its second half, loaded with chiming guitars. “Seekers Who Are Lovers” closes the album as an emotional torch song, led by genuinely operatic vocals from Fraser, who never seemed to inhabit the same mundane plane as the rest of us.

The biggest-selling and probably best Cocteau Twins album is Heaven or Las Vegas from 1990, which struck gold at the height of their 4AD years with astonishing songs such as “Fotzepolitic,” “I Wear Your Ring” and the band’s biggest hit, “Iceblink Luck.” At least half of Milk & Kisses is more restrained than that career high-point and doesn’t connect with the listener quite as quickly, but spend time on texture-heavy songs such as “Ups,” “Calfskin Smack” and “Serpentskirt” and you’ll get there. None of this feels like wasted effort, with the songs sinking inexorably into you and expanding their dimensions as they do so.

Three remaining songs deserve a special mention. “Rilkean Heart,” Fraser’s farewell to her lost lover Jeff Buckley, is one of the album’s hookiest songs and also its bleakest; the unhurried “Eperdu” is all ocean waves and beautifully treated chords; and “Half-Gifts” defies categorisation with an unnerving circus-waltz feel. Honestly, it’s hard to describe this stuff without sounding stoned.

There’’s no indication in any of these songs that this LP would be the Cocteau Twins’ last: the trio had been in a fragile state a couple of years previously, with a full plate of personal issues to deal with, but they’d survived that period intact. When they called it a day in 1997, it came as a surprise, as the deal they’d signed with Fontana after the success of Heaven or Las Vegas had been regarded as a significant commercial step up from their tenure at 4AD. The catalogue hasn’t aged a jot in the interim, though, with the trio’s legacy audible in any number of modern bands—and as swansongs go, Milk & Kisses does the job gracefully.

Q+A

Cocteau Twins co-founder Robin Guthrie looks back on the band’s final album.

What comes to mind when you listen to Milk & Kisses?

This was [a] record where I actually still got my own way about everything. I hadn’t buckled and said, “OK, if you want to do something different, then whatever” because from the minute I started doing a Cocteau Twins record I knew how I wanted it to finish. I made the thing exactly as I wanted. I never had to compromise. Maybe the others felt they had to compromise. That’s fair enough, I get that now.

What was happening around the band at the time?

There was a lot of trauma, drama and torment, with too many chiefs and not enough Indians. We had management and fucking record company people saying, “We want to release double CD singles, so you need to record an extra four songs”—and that kind of pressure just wasn’t really fun.

You remastered Milk & Kisses a few years ago.

I did, yes, but not for vinyl. I have some reservations about the vinyl resurgence that’s going on, because I’m old enough to remember when stepping up to other formats was actually that, a step up. It’s difficult not to sound like a grumpy old guy, but a lot of grumpy old guys like vinyl, because that was what they always knew and liked.

Do you enjoy the vinyl experience yourself?

From a nostalgic point of view it’s fun to get a record out and put it on, and that part of the fun is still there, but when you actually hear it you’re like, “Oh, God. My work is wasted on that.” I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel about it, although the public don’t. The music industry is loving it, because they’re making so much fucking money from vinyl now. I think people are being taken for a ride, buying the same records over and over again—in progressively worse quality.

Does the songwriting on this album still stand up, in your opinion?

The songs stand up pretty well. I couldn’t actually get into our studio, September Sound, at the time because it had gone commercial, and I was sick of everybody anyway, so I came over to France and rented a house and set up a little studio. Liz came over and the two of us worked there on the tracks, and then I took them back to September Sound, where I finished them off and Liz did some extra vocal parts. But a lot of it was done in a little cottage in Finisterre, overlooking the sea, which was pretty cool. The sound of the ocean on “Eperdu” was recorded with two mics that I placed outside the window: the waves were coming in at a certain tempo that I liked. It sounds a bit fucking hippie, doesn’t it? ▣

Read the full article online from its source.