Cocteau Twins: Heaven Or Las Vegas [4AD]

Why you'll love it

It's the Cocteau Twins album most fans call the band's finest hour, a landmark of dream pop that turns up on just about every list of the best albums of all time. We restock it pretty much weekly.

This edition

• Single LP, 10 tracks
• 4AD pressing (cat# CAD3420)
• Includes "Cherry-Coloured Funk", "Iceblink Luck" and the title track

About the album

Heaven Or Las Vegas is generally the Cocteau Twins album most fans, both committed and casual, default to as the band's finest hour. It's also a record that consistently turns up in discussions of the best albums of all time, which would explain why this shimmering slab of effervescent dream-pop from 1990 is a title that we at Kops routinely have to restock on pretty much a weekly basis. Cocteau Twins got the singular thing that Cocteau Twins did supremely right here.

Heaven Or Las Vegas is easily the most tuneful offering in the band's canon, sharpening its always latent gift for angelic melodies into proper pop focus while giving Elizabeth Fraser's gossamer soprano actual, recognizable words to sing rather than gorgeous gibberish (most of the time, anyway). It's got a nice rhythmic pulse, too, approaching a kind of faerie-realm species of dance music on tunes like "Pitch the Baby." If you're gonna tuck just one Cocteau Twins LP away on your shelves, this would be the one.

Also at Kops: more Cocteau Twins on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On 4AD (cat# CAD3420), a reissue of the 1990 album.