There wasn’t a lot of fanfare when Cocteau Twins first released Milk & Kisses in the spring of 1996. Nobody yet knew that it would be their final album, but every attempt to produce a follow-up proved too fractious to overcome and ever since, they have remained in the realm of pop history.
Of course, this only adds to the air of magic and mystery which so bewitched the dewy-eyed 4AD acolytes of the 80s. Almost two decades on, Proper Records are reissuing the album on vinyl in collaboration with Universal Music Recordings, presenting the perfect opportunity to look back at one of the most enchanting bands of their era and discover what their inadvertent finale holds.
Semi-religious abstracts pepper almost every discussion of the Cocteau Twins’ music. The adjective ‘ethereal’ crops up with inevitable regularity. Melody Maker journalist Steve Sutherland hyperventilated that singer Elizabeth Fraser was ‘the voice of God’. Well, what else are you going to call those otherworldly vocals, flickering around the edge of recognisable English like glossolalia? From the icy sheets of reverb to the abstract photography of their album covers, everything about the Cocteaus glows and shifts and shimmers, a musical aurora.
With this in mind, opening track ‘Violaine’ can come as a mild shock. As Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde’s bobbing bass, steady drums, and plangent Johnny Marr-ish guitar all ring out with stately heft, Cocteau Twins no longer sound quite so much like an art project, but a rock band.
The beginning of ‘Serpentskirt’, too, is redolent of Chris Isaak’s 1989 space-cowboy classic ‘Wicked Game’. Yet that song is a keystone of the brooding, dreamlike pop that scores director David Lynch’s work – a sound that may never have emerged but for the foundations the band laid. (Lynch has named their time-stoppingly devastating version of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song to the Siren’, put out under the name This Mortal Coil, as one of his favourite songs.) ‘Serpentskirt’, you could say, is eating its own tail.
But despite their many imitators, nobody could do what the Cocteau Twins did better than they could. As the song continues, it yields more and more to the overpowering purity of Fraser’s vaulting voice, building into a ringing cavern of sound.
The band know that there is beauty lurking between the lines, too. The warmth that ‘Tishbite’ radiates is all the greater because Fraser’s singing, though still taking its customary leaps towards heaven, sits in a gospel-toned organ melody. As when ‘Treasure Hiding’ breaks into a vast, slow, singalong-styled chorus later on the record, there’s no need to fix a meaning to the words. It all speaks for itself.
And yet there are moments on Milk & Kisses which see them operating in a very different mode. Take the spacious, drowsy lilt of ‘Half-Gifts’, which suggests the spectre of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’.
It may be ironic that a Cocteau Twins song should evoke a man known for his deep, restricted delivery and precise imagery, though the lyrics which float up through the musical mists are not only occasionally understandable – shock horror! – but, seeing as the thirteen-year relationship between Fraser and Guthrie had not long ended, startlingly candid. ‘I have my friends, my family,’ sings Fraser. ‘I have myself, I still have me.’
There is, after all, a reason why ‘Song to the Siren’ is still capable of reducing the most jaded of old punks to a helpless sobbing jelly. Hearing that voice delivering direct and identifiable lyrics feels like making sudden, close contact with a ghost longing to get back past the veil.
Yet there are even more affecting numbers on the album then ‘Half-Gifts’. ‘Rilkean Heart’ is Fraser’s tribute to another ex-partner (revered singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley, an aficionado of mystical poet Rainer Maria Rilke), but your heartstrings don’t need to know this. Dipping further into the country idiom than the Cocteaus usually go, it’s an oblique ballad as rueful as it is lovely.
Still, the band recall being content and cooperative during the recording of Milk & Kisses, and it is joy far more than melancholy that sets the tone. The panoramic, fluttering vocals of ‘Calfskin Smack’ mingle with the guitar until you feel like you can get lost in the result.
The enthusiasm that such a stereotypically moody demographic of listeners had for a band who revelled in open-hearted delight sometimes provoked baffled cynicism. ‘What are they doing on the alternative rock charts?’ legendary American rock critic Robert Christgau once scoffed.
For a start, what weren’t they doing? As ‘alternative rock’ scraped out a nihilistic hole in the musical landscape, their modernist-minded punky peers filled it with their own visions of wonder and comfort in the crisp shapes of freedom and solidarity. All well and good, but if you longed for pillowy romanticism and classical beauty, where could you go without looking like Walter the Softy?
Cocteau Twins were one of the few bands who dared answer, and ‘Ups’ provides this beauty in unstinting amounts, its searing trills yelping up and down in sing-song nursery-rhyme fashion. ‘Eperdu’ is no less dazzling, as Fraser ululates angelically over the sound of breaking waves.
Fraser makes the band’s spiritual undertones clearer than ever on the album’s closer, ‘Seekers Who Are Lovers’. When she mentions ‘the breath of God in my mouth’ it’s hard not to remember her Melody Maker-bestowed nickname as, like a vocal stunt pilot, she breaks away from the lullaby-like tune and soars back down to meet it.
Of course, this happiness was not to last. All three members have made music since, but it is doubtful that as a collective they could produce an album so joyful again.
But instead of mourning the records we could have heard, it seems we should take Milk & Kisses – a statement which stands firm against rocky personal circumstances as it shines into the future – as the ideal coda to a magical career. Of all the bands who have ever folded, perhaps it is appropriate that the only chance Cocteau Twins have of reuniting is in our dreams.
Milk & Kisses is reissued on vinyl on Friday 12th January – pre-order via this link
Find out more about Cocteau Twins on their official website
Review by Poppy Bristow
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