Cocteau Twins - Garlands (REMASTERED 180g VINYL 012)

1. Blood Bitch 2. Wax And Wane 3. But I’m Not 4. Blind Deaf Dumb 5. Shallow Then Halo 6. The Hollow Men 7. Garlands 8. Grail Overfloweth * Remastered from the original analogue tapes specially for this vinyl edition and pressed on 180g VINYL, this is a LIMITED EDITION of 5000 copies, with sleeve printed on heavyweight board and newly designed inner bag. * Originally released in June 1982 Garlands was the band debut album and is considered far darker than some their later offerings, being influenced by Siouxsie and the Banshees, early Cure and The Birthday Party. In this early period, Will Heggie’s bass played a significant role in defining their sound, giving it a darker and heavily rhythmic, earthy texture. This combined nicely with Robin Guthrie’s minimalistic and heavily effected guitar arrangements. Garlands features a great deal of distortion and feed-back, smoothed out with chorus, reverb, and flanger. In the background is the Roland 808 drum machine thumping along—a sound that was as characteristically Cocteau as that guitar. Regarding the use of a drum machine, Robin offered at the time, “...the introduction of a fourth party would ruin the rapport of our close knit threesome, so things will have to stay the way they are.” [Sounds Magazine, 1982]. Different instruments show up later, such as the piano found in Hearsay Please, and even more in later releases. Had Will Heggie remained with Cocteau Twins, it’s interesting to imagine how their sound may have evolved. An example would be the album’s title track, “Garlands,” a very hip-hop song for 1982. A journalist at the time, in describing Garlands, wrote: “The fact of the matter is that the album is bloody good. A fluid frieze of wispy images made all the more haunting by Elizabeth’s distilled vocal maturity, fluctuating from a brittle fragility to a voluble dexterity with full range and power.” [Helen Fitzgerald, Sounds Magazine, 1982].