Cocteau Twins have a very odd career shape.
It starts logically enough - first few records they are shaking off influences.
Garlands - OKAY
Lullabies - OKAY
Peppermint Pig - OKAY
Then then bloom into themselves:
Sunburst and Snowblind - SUBLIME!
Head Over Heels - SUBLIMEST!
The Spangle Maker - SUBLIMEST!
"Song to The Siren" (essentially a Cocteaus release) - SUBLIME!
But then they cross over into The Zone of Frou Frou Intensification
Treasure - JUST TOO-TOO PRECIOUS
(I have actually come to like this album more but at the time I spurned it - didn't buy it despite being a huge fan up to that point. There's some great songs like "Lorelei" but the Victoriana girls names thing is a lickle bit ick)
And then I lost track of the Cocteaus during the dreary midriff of the Eighties.
There is a run of releases - 3 EPs and a mini-LP:
Aikea-Guinea - HUH
Tiny Dynamine - HUH
Echoes in A Shallow Bay - HUH
Victorialand (just Robin and Liz on their own) - HUH
I didn't buy any of these and despite repeated attempts over the years, have never been able to get into them, with the exception of "Aikea-Guinea" the song, which is lovely.
I can't even remember the music on these releases. Just a faint after-sense of it being a bit too fiddly and decorative
I mean, yes, yes, Sylvère Lotringer did say "beauty will be amnesiac or will not be at all" but I don't think he quite meant this...
Yet a lot of fans rate them.
And each release reached #1 in the Independent Charts
And then we get to the strange bit of the career arc - suddenly you get a string of greatness again
Love's Easy Tears / Those Eyes That Mouth - SUBLIMEST!
The Moon and the Melodies - SUBLIME!
Blue Bell Knoll - SUBLIMEST!
And then things start to tail off again after this unexpected resurgence
Heaven or Las Vegas - FINE
(actually grown to like this more than I did at the time)
Four-Calendar Cafe - OKAY
(never bothered even listening at the time; it seems pleasant now, overproduced, a sense of a band losing its way)
Milk & Kisses - LET US DRAW A DISCREET VEIL....
So what happened with the middle period?
The mini-LP Victorialand is named after a region of Antarctica.
Then there's the title of "Aikea-Guinea"...
Did Robin and Liz get too cozily domestic, cuddled up on the sofa watching David Attenborough nature documentaries?
But it's not like Cocteau Twins reinvented themselves with the return-to-sublime phase, or even go back to a rawer, more eerie sound that they had earlier on.
They continued the smoothing-out, edging-towards-commercial trajectory, it's just they wrote better melodies - melody just seems to bubble out of them like an unquenchable spring - and Liz is singing sublimely.
What other groups go off the boil like that and then go on the boil again?
Of course you may disagree and think the Treasure to Victorialand phase is their best phase.
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ZFFI obviously a twist on the ZFI or Zone of Fruitless Intensification as explicated here
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Then again, as Alfred Hitchcock said, "self-plagiarism is style"
My own thoughts on style, which once achieved seems almost inevitably to set the artist (or genre) on the path to the Zone of Fruitless Intensification
