4AD's recent release of this Cocteau Twins retrospective finally does this pioneering band's back catalog justice. From the comprehensive track selection to beautifully-designed v23 art printed on a soft, textured paper with vellum overlay, this is the collection that Cocteau Twins fans have been waiting for.
When 4AD released the first Cocteau singles box set, the unwieldy collection was more of a bookshelf trophy than a music document. The crimson box stuffed full of single-length CDs was most notable for its girth, and yet it didn't even cover nearly half of the band's career from the major label days. Lullabies to Violaine fixes all of that by compressing the output of all of the band's singles into a mere four discs, sequenced chronologically and packaged together into something that is both more elaborate and small enough to fit in a normal CD rack.
Listening straight through the discs is a wonderfully organic trip through Cocteau Twins history. Beginning with the rough-edged, post-punk angst of "Feathers-Oar-Blades," it's difficult to imagine how the band would wind up providing a near-muzak version of "Frosty the Snowman" to play in supermarkets over a decade later. The guitars in early Cocteau tracks are angular, noisy and tend to shriek more than soar. When taken a few tracks at a time, though, the progress is evident and it even makes a strange sort of sense as the edges are smoothed out into the blissful, angelic pop for which the band is most well known.
The first evolution comes with "Sugar Hiccup," where Elizabeth Fraser ditches most of her anguished vocal urgency and the pace slows to a lullaby crawl. While I love some of the rough and dirty early tracks, it's the mid-to-late 4AD period that will always define Cocteau Twins for me, and those records are represented with some wonderfully obscure alternate versions of tracks and singles that I'd long forgotten. Putting "The Spangle Maker" and "Pearly Dewdrops' Drops" into the larger context is one of the invaluable services that this set provides.
Discs three and four cover the Four Calendar Café and later years; and while I've never been as much of a fan of that era as I was of records like Blue Bell Knoll, it's amazing to look back at the volume and variety of a period that is mostly remembered for an overly-saccharine record and a let-down of a swan song. The acoustic Twinlights EP was an interesting unplugged experiment, but the minimalist, electronic reconstructions of Otherness rank as one of the band's best and biggest surprises. The single for "Violaine," is another late-era highlight and the omnipresent in retail yet difficult to track down Christmas singles are included for good measure.
All of this is wrapped up in the kind of package that is befitting a band that perhaps first justified the much-overused adjective "ethereal" as applied to music. The white fold out package is printed on a white, billowy paper that feels otherworldly yet wholly appropriate. At this point in my life, I've been a Cocteau Twins fan longer than not, and it's great to have the v23 designed retrospective that's complete and mysterious, beautifully simple and yet as evocative as the band ever was.
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