Cocteau Twins - Four Calendar Cafe

In October 1993, Cocteau Twins did something nobody expected: they let you hear the words. After a decade on 4AD and the breakthrough of Heaven or Las Vegas, the trio had moved to Fontana in the UK and Capitol in the US, and Four-Calendar Café arrived as their first statement from the other side. Elizabeth Fraser's lyrics are still cryptic, but for the first time they come through clearly enough to follow, and what they reveal is a band growing up in public.

Recorded and produced by the band at September Sound, their own studio on the banks of the Thames in West London, the album trades some of the old haze for clarity without losing the shimmer. "Evangeline" drifts in on a slow, aching melody, "Bluebeard" is as close to straight guitar pop as the group ever came, and "Summerhead" lets Robin Guthrie's layered guitars swell around one of Fraser's most open vocals. Simon Raymonde's bass and piano hold it all together with a lightness that makes the sadness underneath hit harder.

It is a beautiful, bittersweet record, mature and fragile in equal measure, and it reached number 13 on the UK album chart. Long overshadowed by the albums before it, it has steadily earned its place as one of the most affecting in the catalog. Even the sleeve is memorable: a still life of inanimate objects by Walter Wick, the photographer behind the I Spy children's books.

This 4AD reissue brings the album back to the band's original label, remastered by Robin Guthrie and pressed on vinyl in the US for the first time. More than thirty years on, Four-Calendar Café still stands tall.