That directness-along with the title and unexpected singer-songwriter vibe of the accompanying album, Four-Calendar Café-carried through on “Bluebeard,” the next single. “I had to fantasize just to survive,” Fraser announces over a tear-jerking final key change. A power ballad that could make Diane Warren proud, “Evangeline” suggests these poetics were always protective cloaks. Perhaps because she was a woman, fans sold it short as divine inspiration, while foes dismissed it as some girlie bullshit. Fraser shaped assemblages of academic and arcane lexicons over the Beach Boys’ close and complicated harmonies, forming an inimitable style. Michael Stipe could mumble and be haled, and other guys made careers of bad poetry inspired by Burroughsian cut-ups. And almost never before had Fraser just sort of stood there and sang. It begins with a guitar being picked, something more identifiable than Guthrie had ever offered. The second shock of “Evangeline” was the sound. But Treasure Hiding is sometimes just good, its miscellany confirming suspicions that the Twins sometimes settled for spinning their celestial wheels. Treasure Hiding: The Fontana Years gathers their creations for a new label after “Evangeline”-four subsequent singles, their B-sides and the albums they accompanied, a pair of lovely EPs, some typically beautiful odds and ends, and a few live sessions. When a single, “Evangeline,” arrived in 1993, the first shock was its mere existence. The survival of their marriage and the band seemed unlikely. The birth of Fraser and Guthrie’s child had largely inspired the wonder of Heaven, but becoming parents was no panacea.
They left the label they’d defined, 4AD, in a flurry of financial and personal acrimony… and cocaine. Simon Raymonde, who joined soon after the Twins began, offered unexpected choral basslines that propelled it all.Īnd then, Cocteau Twins began to break down. Her partner, Robin Guthrie, played guitar and programmed drum machines with the sui generis, near-mystical ease of Mark Rothko’s painting or Martha Graham’s motion. Elizabeth Fraser’s voice could do anything and did everything, groaning like a rusty switchblade being opened, soothing like a dopamine flood in the brain, performing runs like Mariah Carey and Maria Callas combined. Their catalogue of curiosities sounded nothing like what had come before. Before Cocteau Twins released their perfect sixth album, Heaven or Las Vegas, in 1990, they had spent the previous decade building a discography as innovative and amorphous as, say, Bowie in the 1970s or Aphex Twin in the 1990s.
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