Cocteau Twins....

Easy Street has a GRIP of Cocteau Twins CD singles, so much so that I might be able to finish off my collection in one fell swoop if I can just hold out till friday (payday). In the meantime, I picked up two that caught my eye, either because of the Vaughn Oliver cover(Echoes In A Shallow Bay), or the weird title (Aikea-Guinea). There were LOTS more left over, and at $4 a pop, I'm a little worried someone else might snatch them up. The Cocteau Twins were prolific, just a steady stream of creativity there for a long while. They never sat on their laurels in between albums, lots of EP's followed, most of it wasn't intended for the album it seems like, no album tracks appear on their EP's, which I think is really commendable. "Echoes In A Shallow Bay" is a good one, sort of themed around moths and butterflies found in the UK. Not that you'd be able to tell because of Elisabeth Fraser's buried voice. Only on later albums do you really get to make out what she's singing. "Echoes" is maybe my favorite Cocteau Twins EP, mostly because it contains the track "Eggs And Their Shells" which is one of my favorite Cocteau Twins songs ever.

"Aikea-Guinea" is an earlier EP, it was also a 7" single too if I recall. I like this one a lot too, the title of the EP is a Scottish term for "Seashell". Who knew? This one, although earlier than "Echoes", shares a lot of the same sound, plodding drums (programmed, unfortunately. I feel like these guys could have been so much better with a drummer), Elizabeth's voice buried slightly just to obscure what she's saying, which I feel is part of the appeal to the Cocteau Twins. Really a flawless effort. I find that I love the Cocteau Twins more and more as I get older. Am I mellowing out? Is it inevitable? I don't know. But as pleasing as these songs are, this is still pretty left field stuff. If you played it for your boss, or your parents, they might look at you funny. Both of these EP's are available on the "Lullabies to Violaine" boxed set, which is pretty expensive, or you can find it as a singles edition broken up into two CD's sold separately. Probably the way to go. I myself am looking to score the individual singles. That's how I roll....

2 CDEP's equals 8 songs which makes the count at 17879....