100 favourite songs: #9: "Lorelei" - Cocteau Twins

I once faintly, as if in a dream, heard someone describe the Cocteau Twins’ music as a floating cloud of fuchsia mist, and I don’t know if I could do much better than that; the quintessential 4AD band, this outfit practically invented dream-pop, and their muse found perhaps its most perfect expression on Treasure. Ringing percussion, guitars which by turns crash and trill, ethereally shimmering layers of sound, and all topped by Liz Fraser’s outlandish, nonsensical vocals, delivered in the most beautiful voice — this is music in which to lose oneself. ‘Music is feeling, then, not sound,’ or so the poet Wallace Stevens once said, and he was half right, for the truth is that music is essentially and immanently both feeling and sound, and it’s in the interplay between the two that we respond to it. Listening to Treasure, one is haunted by a succession of atmospheres — now funereal, now urgent, now contemplative, now violent, now hymnal, now joyous, always just beyond the limits of ordinary definition — and for a while, at least, what you experience is what you are; feeling and sound, sound and feeling. - 27/2/03

Treasure … houses what is probably the Cocteaus’ finest individual moment, the glacially roiling, incandescent “Lorelei” … “Lorelei” really does see them at their most evocative. Liz Fraser’s voice, always uniquely compelling, soars and swoops and dives and soars again, assuming an aspect that is somehow both reverent and commanding, and everything else — that indescribable dream-fabric of sound that the Cocteaus seemingly so effortlessly wove — just coheres around it. - 2/8/03