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 murmur and crash, 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. - 27/2/03There was a time when the Cocteaus were without a doubt my favourite band, and
Treasure was the main reason; nowadays, their music is perhaps over-familiar, for while it's still transportive, it's relatively rare for one of their records to take me anywhere new. Still, there's an essential mystery to the outfit's music which endures, and perhaps especially on
Treasure, an aptly named record if ever there was one, for there's something distinctly jewel-like about it, something glittering and multi-faceted and beautiful. It doesn't sound like anything else I've ever heard; the pictures it paints are all its own.
