I bought a Copy of Cocteau Twins — Heaven or Las Vegas | Full Vinyl Session + The Melody Underneath
Heaven or Las Vegas — played in full, vinyl, start to finish. Ten tracks. The record where the tunes finally came out from behind the weather, made by two people falling apart, released on their daughter's first birthday. Halfway through the sessions, the bass player's father died — a man who wrote pop melodies for a living.
The session opens without words. A record after every single song — where this kind of melody came from, who else had it at the time, and who kept writing it afterwards.
Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins you can listening on other channels too:
Total runtime approx. 1 hr 40.
Thank you for Listening
Rafi Mercer - Founder of Tracks & Tales
TRACKLIST
OPENING TRACK
01 Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder) — The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966)
A song that asks the other person to stop speaking and listen to his heartbeat instead. The oldest instruction in the session: the feeling is in the harmony, not the words.
SIDE A
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
02 Cherry-Coloured Funk — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
Three minutes of pure tune. Guthrie built the music first; Fraser wrote and recorded her vocals last. Here the voice is the lead instrument and everything else is arranged around it.
03 Everybody's Been Burned — The Byrds - Younger Than Yesterday (Columbia, 1967)
David Crosby had carried this one around since before the band existed. A twelve-string Rickenbacker playing figures rather than chords — where Robin Guthrie's guitar actually begins, and the one where the jangle turns melancholy.
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
04 Pitch the Baby — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
Lucy Belle was born in September 1989, while the record was being written. The album arrived on her first birthday. Simon Raymonde's bassline carries this one.
05 Someone Somewhere in Summertime — Simple Minds - New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) (Virgin, 1982)
Cocteau Twins took their name from a song by Johnny and the Self-Abusers — the Glasgow band that became Simple Minds. All the atmosphere you want, as long as a melody is standing in the middle holding it up.
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
06 Iceblink Luck — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
The single, and the most direct three minutes they ever recorded. Strip the reverb off and it's a perfectly built pop song. Leave it on and it still is.
07 Here's Where the Story Ends — The Sundays - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (Rough Trade, 1990)
Released eight months earlier, and greeted with the same comparison every time. Two bands endlessly measured against each other, and both of them turn out to be about the tune rather than the texture.
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
08 Fifty-Fifty Clown — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
The fastest thing on the album — the guitar figure pushing where most of the record floats. A reminder that this band had rhythm as well as weather.
09 Cloudbusting — Kate Bush - Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985)
Built in a studio at her own home, with complete control over the process. The record that proved an uncategorisable voice could sit on top of an enormous melody and reach everyone without explaining itself.
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
10 Heaven or Las Vegas — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
The most intelligible vocal Fraser had recorded to that point — you can make out whole phrases. The melody climbs and keeps climbing, and side A closes on the album's highest point.
THE TURN
11 The Downtown Lights — The Blue Nile - Hats (Linn, 1989)
Four albums in twenty years, recorded in Glasgow for a label a turntable manufacturer started largely to have something worth demonstrating its equipment with. Six minutes of mostly space, with Paul Buchanan's voice arriving in the gaps.
SIDE B
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
12 I Wear Your Ring — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
Side B opens with the hardest-driving track on the record. Side A ends on the grandest moment, side B begins with the most physical — the oldest trick in album building, and still the right one.
13 In Dreams — Roy Orbison (Monument, 1963)
The tune arrived while he was half asleep; he finished it the next morning in about twenty minutes. No chorus, no repeated verse — seven sections, each arriving once, ending an octave below where it began. And it was a hit.
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
14 Fotzepolitic — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
One of the strangest titles in a catalogue built on strange titles, carrying one of the most conventionally beautiful melodies Fraser ever wrote.
15 Fade Into You — Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See (Capitol, 1993)
It took more than a year to become a hit, then stayed on American radio for the rest of the decade. The same combination — a half-submerged voice, a slow unambiguous tune — and the lineage is audible in the first eight bars.
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
16 Wolf in the Breast — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
One of the few songs here where the words resolve into something like a plain statement of distress. The band made their happiest-sounding record at their unhappiest moment.
17 Falling — Julee Cruise - Floating into the Night (Warner Bros., 1989)
Written by Angelo Badalamenti with lyrics by David Lynch. The instrumental became the Twin Peaks theme when the series aired in April 1990 — five months before this album came out. Arriving at the same place from a completely different direction.
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
18 Road, River and Rail — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
A three-word title listing three ways of leaving. After eight songs mostly about one house and one child, the album starts looking outwards.
19 I Only Want to Be with You — Dusty Springfield (Philips, 1963)
Her debut solo single, co-written by Ivor Raymonde — Simon Raymonde's father. He died on 4 June 1990, in the middle of these sessions. A man who wrote and arranged tunes for a living, dying while his son made the most melodic record he would ever play on.
HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS
20 Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires — Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (4AD, 1990)
The longest track, and the album's close. Widely understood as being about the birth of their daughter. A band who had spent a decade refusing to resolve anything finally let a song rise all the way and finish.
CLOSING TRACK
21 Take Care — Beach House - Teen Dream (Bella Union / Sub Pop, 2010)
Released in the UK on Bella Union — the label Simon Raymonde founded after the Cocteau Twins ended, and the one he has used to bring his father's arrangements back into print. Three generations of the same family business, and the business is melody.
