Why the Cocteau Twins' "Heaven or Las Vegas" is A+ Dream-Pop

I celebrate the most influential dream-pop record of all time to mark its 35th anniversary.

This album review celebrates the most influential dream-pop record of all time to mark its 35th anniversary.

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Genre: Dream-pop, Shoegaze, Ambient

Label: 4AD

Release Date: September 17, 1990

Vibe: 🌌

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

Despite the sheer volume of music I consume in an average calendar year (I’m talking at least 300 new-to-me albums every 12 months), I don’t consider myself a hardcore audiophile. I’ve never spent obscene amounts of money on speakers, amplifiers, headphones, and the like. To a degree, that’s because I don’t trust my ears to pick up that much detail after a nearly 15-year DJ career that I’m sure has resulted in at least a little bit of hearing loss (sidebar: Please, whatever you do, don’t deprioritize safeguards if you’re going to be exposed to loud music, especially in a public setting). The biggest move I had was upgrading my digital streaming experience to lossless audio. For albums that smother you with seductive textures and notes that are bent almost beyond comprehension, that shift can make a difference, even if you’re using average consumer hardware to deliver the sound. A record like Heaven or Las Vegas goes from being a pleasurable 37 minutes to an all-consuming, ethereal voyage into the unknown.

Oddly enough, Scottish outfit Cocteau Twins accomplished this by subtracting from their sound, not adding to it. Their previous effort, 1988’s Blue Bell Knoll, was pretty in a dense, sometimes impenetrable way, with layer after layer of instrumentation, which ends up burying a lot of the emotional resonance for me. Vocalist Elizabeth Fraser, in particular, is given the short shrift, her words frequently drowned out by walls of sound no singer would ever be able to climb over. In this specific regard, there are limits on even the most intricate dream-pop tapestries. To the degree that it was a problem to solve, Heaven of Las Vegas scales back the disorientation and pomp to more manageable (and more affecting) levels without losing the lush, elusive energy that makes their best material stand alone at the top of the genre’s all-time mountaintop. They did far more with less going on.

Released in September 1990, this album arrived right as personal crises threatened to derail the creative momentum Cocteau Twins had spent the better part of a decade cultivating. Their signature sound had finally begun to find a stateside audience after the music video for Knoll standout “Carolyn’s Fingers” gained traction on MTV. However, behind the scenes, the band members’ relationships with each other and the music were fraying. Fraser and co-founding guitarist Robin Guthrie welcomed a daughter a year prior, but the latter’s increasing dependency on cocaine put a massive strain on the new family unit. Meanwhile, bassist Simon Raymonde lost his father midway through recording, a blow that he later said “helped the record have that edge to it.” While Guthrie completed the record’s drum programming, he spent less time in the studio, which opened the door for Raymonde to take a more prominent role. He said it was in seizing that moment when he realized how unbelievable Fraser was as a vocalist.

"She'd come into the control room and say, 'What was that like?' and I'd scrape the tears away and say, 'That was alright, Liz.' She didn't get off on praise. If I said, 'That was f***** amazing', she'd say 'I thought it was s***.' I learnt not to be too effusive, which was difficult because I was so blown away with what I was hearing.”*

The emotional backdrop for Heaven or Las Vegas was chaos. But that chaos sparked unusually open, emotionally rich, and frankly breathtaking songcraft. Recorded primarily at September Sound, a converted West London church that had become their semi-frequent home base, the songs have this cavernous quality to them, leaving ample room in the soundstage for you to explore and, if you give yourself over to the music completely, get lost in. There’s a brightness to these tracks that expertly toes the line between meticulousness and intuitive, structured and shapeless. The former is built mainly on Raymonde’s bass grooves, which prevent several of the compositions from floating completely out of the reach of the listener, while Fraser’s raw radiance cuts right through those lines, like a bright shard of sun hitting a frozen lake. Those in-between moments, right before euphoria or collapse, give this album its inescapable gravitational pull.

There’s no better proxy for how effectively Heaven can suck you in than opener “Cherry-Colored Funk.” Guthrie’s ultra-cool, reverb-drenched chords pulse under Fraser’s words like warm puffs of breath on a cold winter night. Even if you can’t make you everything she says through the soft-focus production aesthetic, it’s not like you don’t feel anything, either. The same can be said for “Pitch the Baby” and “Fifty-Fifty Clown,” which add stuttering, icy synths and boom-bap-y drum loops to the mix. Elsewhere, “Iceblink Luck” is as close to a straight-up pop song as the Cocteau Twins ever released, without ever losing the personality that made their work distinctive in the first place. Written in part about her daughter, it’s my personal favorite Fraser contribution to the LP. The final line reading—“Thank you for mending me, babies”—is so tender and luminous that it lingers in my mind’s eye every time I hear it.

That said, the most powerful moments come at the midway point and the end of the album. The former is the title track, a joyful yet strange creation that somehow offers just enough clarity for it to catch on. Under the shimmering instrumentation, Fraser builds her most sincere (though that could be just a diplomatic framing of lovesick naivety) protagonist, a dreamer who’s fallen for a guy who’s either running away or towards the wrong side of the tracks. It’s not entirely obvious which one it is, and, honestly, it doesn’t really matter. For nearly five minutes, it’s like the haze parts, graciously allowing you to move around freely. The latter is the closer, “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires,” a spectacular six minutes of aching ecstasy. Fraser’s vocals are at their most untethered here, oscillating between assertion and fragility until they both dissolve into a wash of layered guitars. The climactic note hovers in your ears for just long enough before vanishing completely. It’s a perfect way to end a fantastic LP.

For as lauded as Heaven or Las Vegas is now, it wasn’t a notable commercial success from the outset. It peaked at 99 on the Billboard 200, though it did crack the Top 10 on the UK album charts. In several ways, it marked the end of an era for the band, which would release two more studio albums before breaking up in 1997. But, as so often happens, history’s longest shadows are cast by the most unexpected sources. Heaven or Las Vegas has become a cornerstone in dream-pop, ambient, and art-pop circles, inspiring acts like M83, Beach House, Cigarettes After Sex, Alvvays, and Japanese Breakfast. Even arena headliners like Radiohead and the Weeknd have referenced the Cocteau Twins, with the latter sampling this record as part of his hugely successful House of Balloons mixtape. As pop continues to favor hazy production and airy, tenuous harmonies, I expect new generations will continue to discover and reclaim this LP for years to come.

Part of why I think these songs in particular have been so influential is because they conjure feelings we may not fully understand on a first, second, or third listen, but we internalize them. We sit with them. They remind us that, in choosing abstraction over concrete explanation, we may get at the truth quicker and maybe more organically than we would if we approached the search logically. It’s a profoundly human experience that’s rarely communicated as effectively as it is here.

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Where are my Cocteau Twins fans at? Make your presence known in the comments.