Popcorn Noises

Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

Last week, the no.7 album in the UK was Paolo Nutini’s Sunny Side Up, which doesn’t really sound like a young man playing folk-pop so much as a very boring old man singing for preschoolers. Twenty years ago, it was this album. Oh how the times have a-changed, right? And yet, why shouldn’t Heaven or Las Vegas have been a commercial success? It marks the height of the Twins’ openness and pop accessibility. While guitarist and usual sound architect Robin Guthrie was battling heavy drug addiction, bassist Simon Raymonde took more of a musical front seat and singer Elizabeth Fraser wrote and performed more candidly, especially about the recent birth of her daughter Lucy Belle. The album was released by the hippest UK label ever, 4AD, whose president Ivo Watts-Russell called it one of the best things the label ever put out, even as his relationship with the band was crumbling—he would release Cocteau Twins from their contract at the end of 1990, mere months after Heaven came out. Quite a complement to get from someone who was about to fire you. Not that they hadn’t earned it, of course.

The album opens with skeletal drums and Guthrie’s unbelievably smooth, soaring guitar. In fact, aside from some softer synthesizers filling out the arrangement, “Cherry-Coloured Funk” doesn’t develop much beyond those textures. And yet, like the rest of Heaven, it feels unwaveringly lush and ornate. The secret weapon, of course, is Fraser’s confident, flexible voice. Listen to how natural she sounds sliding between low notes on the verses and how she doesn’t lose an ounce of power when she jumps into falsetto on the chorus. The band also wisely left the vocals fairly dry and up front in the mix, dodging the typical shoegazer’s mistake of burying their most beguiling element for the sake of atmosphere. “Pitch the Baby” has a lot of the same sounds, but foreground’s Raymonde’s lite-funk bass line, while “Fifty-Fifty Clown” is more grounded and beat-driven, evoking Fleetwood Mac at their druggiest. “Fotzepolitic” is a jangly, Slowdive-esque rocker, “Wolf in the Breast” is an alternate-universe high school slow dance, and “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” finishes the record on a note of semi-epic wistfulness, its spitfire syllables slowly disappearing over the horizon.

But the most essential song here—and my personal favorite—has to be the title track. One of two songs from the album released as singles (the other being “Iceblink Luck”), “Heaven or Las Vegas” is pure perfect dream pop. It is by far the lushest and most finished-sounding song on the album, its heavy 80s drums supplemented with processed bongos, its synths and guitars playing twin leads, and Fraser’s voice doubled and tripled into a harmonic force to be reckoned with. Notice how the descending three-note synth hook in the verses gets resolved by the strums of the rhythm guitar, and how Fraser’s voice intensifies to a near-scream on the chorus (“Must be why I’m thinking of Las VegaaaaAAAAS”) without ever sounding less than totally controlled. Every verse, bridge, and chorus feels ideally placed and every melody is compelling and evenly paced. It’s an absolute triumph of a song and I have no clue at all what it might be about.

Listening through it today, Heaven or Las Vegas sounds inextricably linked to time and place. Its tinny drum machines, sterile synthesizers, and thin digital reverb are textbook late-80s, so much so that the record’s most direct contemporary offspring, M83’s Saturdays=Youth, is a work of explicit nostalgia. While it’s important to remember that, at the time, the technology was cutting edge (and the amount of cocaine consumed was copious), it’s also important not to make excuses for the past. Cocteau Twins’ mysterious, icy aloofness is largely generated by these dated textures. They wouldn’t be the same band without them, and Heaven would not be the self-contained masterpiece that it is were it not bound to its historical moment. Anyone even remotely interested in first wave shoegaze and dream pop should consider this required listening. Period.