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Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas at Thirty-Five
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THE sixth studio album…
IN THIS PHOTO: Cocteau Twins, left to right: Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser and Simon Raymonde/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Tonge/Getty Images
from the Scottish band, Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas turns thirty-five on 17th September. Released two years after Blue Bell Knoll and three years before Four-Calendar Café, this was a golden run from the band. However, Heaven or Las Vegas might be the best and most influential album they released. Reaching number seven in the U.K., this was one of the first classic albums of the 1990s. Led by Elizabeth Fraser, who has one of the most distinct and unique voices in music history, there is something intoxicating and unforgettable about Heaven or Las Vegas. Fraser creates her own worlds when she sings! Her own language. Ranked alongside the best albums of the 1990s – and of all-time -, I know there will be fresh retrospection closer to its anniversary. On 17th September, 1990, this amazingly beautiful and strange album was released. I have found some features and reviews for Heaven or Las Vegas. Even if they may repeat some background and facts, they are all well worth reading. I want to start with Guitar and their 2020 salute. They write how Heaven or Las Vegas is defined by the band’s influential guitarist and producer, Robin Guthrie:
“The ethereal splendour of Heaven Or Las Vegas disguises the dark cloud under which it was crafted, the sessions at the band’s September Sound studio, once owned by Pete Townshend, overshadowed by the transience of death, birth and heartbreak. “It was trying to mask all the other shit that was going on that we didn’t want to stop and think about for too long,” says Raymonde, whose father the composer and arranger Ivor Raymonde died while they were making the record. Furthermore, Fraser and guitarist/producer Robin Guthrie welcomed their first child, Lucy Belle, into the world just as their relationship began to falter under the weight of Guthrie’s struggles with addiction. It’s all chronicled on an album of transcendent beauty, with a guitarist at the peak of his powers its central figure.
A gentle sort of player
While many Cocteaus fans were swept away by Fraser’s hypnotic vocal layering, Guthrie was an equally essential force, and Heaven Or Las Vegas was a personal crusade to get the intricate symphonies that occupied his brain onto tape. Initially a punk fan and under-confident player, the self-confessed gearhead from Grangemouth, Scotland, developed his own singular style, eschewing solos and instead constructing composite parts out of stacked chords and icy arpeggios lavished with effects. Alongside Kevin Shields, he became the source from which a crop of ‘textural’ guitar players drew inspiration. “I’m a very gentle sort of player, and I let the electronics do the work,” Guthrie told xlr8r.com “It’s quite an opposite approach from the vast majority of electric guitar players who bash the hell out of their instrument.”
On Heaven Or Las Vegas, Guthrie played four electrics – a 1959 Jazzmaster, 1959 Stratocaster, a PRS and on the title track’s divine slide solo a modified Levinson Blade JM, running into the desk through Marshall 9000 Series and Gallien-Krueger preamps. Alongside an array of rack effects, he used BOSS chorus, phaser, flanger and vibrato pedals, a Cry Baby wah, a Yamaha D1500 delay and an Electro-Harmonix Clone Theory chorus/vibrato. The result was, to borrow The Verve’s debut album title, a storm in heaven, and it often sounded uncannily like a synthesiser. “The aim was to make music with punk’s energy but more finesse and beauty, and that shiny, dense Phil Spector sound,” said Guthrie.
Their finest hour
“We like it better than all our last records,” said Guthrie on Heaven Or Las Vegas’ release on 17 September 1990. “That’s why we continue to make more – because if we made the perfect record we’d sit back and say, ‘We can’t do any better than that’. We think all our other ones are fucking crap.”
Q’s Martin Aston concurred, calling the record “their finest hour”. Colin Larkin ranked Heaven Or Las Vegas at 218 in his All-Time 1000 Albums book, noting “their music has a sustainable beauty free of regard for contemporaries or peers”. The album was the band’s most successful, landing at No.7 in the UK chart, but it was to be their last for 4AD. While they released two more LPs on Fontana, Cocteau Twins finally split in 1997, later calling off a reunion because Fraser couldn’t stand the idea of being on stage with Guthrie.
If it was a final flutter before everything began to fall apart, Heaven Or Las Vegas was an astonishing success, and Robin Guthrie’s playing left behind a smouldering torch that the coming wave of stompbox-hungry sonic sorcerers would pick up and carry forth – many of them on 4AD and Raymonde’s Bella Union label. Heaven Or Las Vegas? The Cocteaus’ sixth album is emphatically the sound of the former”.
Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser and Simon Raymonde released one of the best albums of the 1990s only nine months into the decade! Even now, you cannot compare anything to Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas. Such a beguiling and bewitching album. Transformative and transfixing music, Pitchfork reviewed the 2014 reissues of Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas. They say how the 4AD-reissued albums spotlight Cocteau Twins as “boundary-pushing innovators as first and foremost a pop band”:
“Even as the band soared commercially and creatively, personally they suffered. Between the release of Blue Bell Knoll and the recording of Heaven or Las Vegas, Fraser gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, yet Guthrie remained deep in the throes of drug addiction, which made him paranoid and angry. Raymonde mourned the death of his father. Suddenly the stakes for the Cocteau Twins seemed impossibly high. “Fraser named the album Heaven or Las Vegas [as] a suggestion of music versus commerce, or perhaps a gamble, one last throw of the dice,” Martin Aston writes in Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, implying that the band was close to imploding.
Instead, they turned all that turmoil and uncertainty into the best album of their career. Heaven or Las Vegas explodes in Technicolor from the first melty guitar chords on “Cherry-Coloured Funk”. Every note sounds like a new and richer shade of indigo and scarlet and violet than the previous one, and it doesn’t fade until closer “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” descends into silence. If Blue Bell Knoll is spare and ambient, Heaven is supersaturated: lush without being vulgar, luxuriant without being indulgent. Tellingly, some lyrics bubble up to the surface, often loaded with personal meaning: “cherry,” “perfection,” “burn this madhouse down.” On a song called “Pitch the Baby”, ostensibly written for—or at least sung to—the couple’s infant daughter, Fraser repeats, “I’m so happy to care for you, I only want to love you,” as a sweet lullaby. We may not always be able to understand her lyrics, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. In fact, her lyrics would never be more vital or confessional than they are on Heaven or Las Vegas, which lends the music added emotional and conceptual heft.
What’s particularly remarkable about the album is how compact it is: All but two of these 10 tracks clock in around three-and-a-half minutes, and the whole thing is over and done with in a mere 38 minutes. That succinctness may have something to do with Raymonde’s increasing role in the group. His bass playing, especially on “Pitch the Baby” and “Fotzepolitic”, not only adds to the texture and, yes, the groove of the music, but also gingerly anchors these songs: He prevents them from flying off into the ether, but never lets them grow rigid or staid. The result is an album that perfectly balances ambition with accessibility. Together, these two releases—which were their last for 4AD—present the Cocteau Twins as first and foremost a pop band, and pop rarely sounds as transformative and as transfixing as it does here”.
I don’t know if I heard Cocteau Twins or knew much about their music in 1990. I would have been seven. I think it was years later when I discovered them. However, I do listen to tracks from Heaven or Las Vegas every so often. I can appreciate how special the album is. When I do listen to the entire album, it is this phenomenal and engrossing listening experience. I wonder if there are any plans for the thirty-fifth anniversary on 17th September. Albumism wrote about the band’s fifth studio album in 2020:
“Pitch” picks up where “For Phoebe Still a Baby” on Blue Bell Knoll (1988) left off; she has now given birth to Lucy Belle. Where “Phoebe” drifts and wavers, “Pitch” is rooted and grounded in the act of giving birth and mothering, rather than the abstract. “I only want to love you,” she coos in her lullaby. Fraser’s lyrics are still the ethereal spellcasting of previous albums, but her pronunciation is clearer and, as such, more accessible to the wider audience the band was given after signing with Capitol Records in 1988.
Though hardly a concept album, the twin themes of birth and death echo across the landscape. Raymonde’s father Ivor, a renowned composer for acts including Dusty Springfield, died during production, and “Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires,” the album’s final track, wrestles with “a war we all lose.” Fraser whispers and the boys play sparsely until the chorus, not a dirge, but a reflection on the passage of life and time.
Appearing as the second track on the album, “Iceblink Luck” ties both themes together, Guthrie and Raymonde’s wall of sound turned glass and lit from the dance floor like New Year’s Eve. It’s a tender song, a last-ditch dream as Fraser tries to honor the elder Raymonde’s past and resolve her soon-to-dissolve future with Guthrie. “You’re really both bone-setters / thank you for mending me babies,” she sings to the man and the ghost and the babe in her arms, a mending that, like the plaster of a cast, is only temporary. Three years later, while recording Four Calendar Café (1993), she would suffer a nervous breakdown and Guthrie’s drug problems would worsen, the relationship soured and never recovered. But for the moment, there is love between the three Twins, there is hope.
The hope doesn’t last, alas, crumpling on “I Wear Your Ring” and “Fotzepolitic.” They held it together for two more albums before their contract ran out and they disbanded. All three have gone on to produce and record a lifetime’s worth of music since, though a reunion in 2005 was scrapped when Fraser admitted she couldn’t endure being on stage with Guthrie”.
There is one more feature I want to include here. It is from CRACK. Published in 2021, the feature coincided with Miley Cyrus covering Heaven or Las Vegas’s title track. Singing the song when opening the Resorts World Casino in Las Vegas, it was a nervous moment for fans of Cocteau Twins. A band and discography that is hard to cover and make different, how many can tackle the Scottish band’s incredible music and make it sound original or even competent?! Though Miley Cyrus did a good job, one of the incredible things about an album like Heaven or Las Vegas is that is so distinct and untouchable:
“Heaven or Las Vegas, the album, was the moment Cocteau Twins became the band they had always threatened to be. It’s the record with the strongest pop songs and the most sparkling instrumentation. Both the happiest and the saddest work in their canon, Heaven or Las Vegas was when it all seemed to work for them, not so much a step-up from the preceding Blue Bell Knoll as a vast leap into the ether. The artistic success of Heaven or Las Vegas is often linked to Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie – lead guitarist and Fraser’s then-romantic partner – becoming parents during the recording of the album. Fraser once said that being pregnant had given her clarity and confidence, which was lost when the baby was born and the couple were plunged into parenthood. A number of songs on Heaven or Las Vegas directly address Fraser’s experience of motherhood, in particular Pitch the Baby, a moment of ecstatic optimism.
But mixed with this hope is the creeping influence of the darker side of life, as Guthrie’s cocaine use became increasingly problematic. This gave Heaven or Las Vegas an intriguing – and perhaps unique – push and pull in the band’s catalogue, as anxiety stalked contentment and joy looked nervously down on depression. Bassist Simon Raymonde wrote brooding album closer Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires the day after his father died, while opener Cherry-Coloured Funk feels like a blues song on a gloomy day in heaven, the mournful melody and moody chords of the verses bursting into a chorus of glorious joy, like a plane breaking through storm clouds to reveal blue skies.
This may sound like over-exuberant nonsense. But it’s hard not to get hyperbolic when faced with a work as perfectly different as Heaven or Las Vegas, a record that takes the base elements of rock music – guitar, drums, bass and voice – and alchemises them into something entirely foreign. You can trace the influences of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Kate Bush on the Cocteau Twins, particularly in their early years. But by 1990 nobody really sounded like them, their music instantly recognisable in its immaculate shimmer, as if washed clean of dirt to take on more emotion.
Cocteau Twins eventually split in 1997, with personal animosity so far preventing a reunion. But the band’s reputation has only grown since, becoming a touchstone for a kind of rapturous mysticism, to the point that The Weeknd sampled Cherry-Coloured Funk on his 2011 mixtape House of Balloons and no one batted an eyelid. Even Prince tried to emulate the Cocteau Twins, recording Tictactoe for his 2014 album Plectrumelectrum after a night partying to the band’s music”.
An album like no other, I am curious to see what is written about Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas on 17th September. Even if I am slightly late to the band and this masterpiece, I can now appreciate why it is so admired and has this incredible reputation. Even if Heaven or Las Vegas had a trouble past and gestation, in its finished form, it sounds more extraordinary and resounds harder than any other album by the Cocteau Twins. Did fans of the band know what would come with Heaven or Las Vegas…
BACK in 1990?