Cocteau Twins

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Over the course of the fall and winter I've been listening a lot to this pioneering shoegaze group which still remains my pick of the litter as far as that style goes, perhaps as a result of them being a bit more willing to think outside pop/rock songwriting convention than usual. I think so far that Blue Bell Knoll is my favourite album of theirs, but I've yet to have explored the entirety of their discography. I might in fact end up preferring their earlier, gothier/punkier material but the time still remains.
To be honest, it seems to be that CT are a band I like in spite of themselves: At first, their approach to sounding ethereal and otherworldly struck me as somewhat New Age-kitschy in an "ideal background music for a store that sells incense and scented candles" way, with the 1980s indie pop aesthetics being a bit further out of my own cultural comfort zone than something like CT's key influence Siouxsie and the Banshees not helping... but at some point they finally clicked for me. The best example of this is probably Liz Fraser's "glossolalia" vocal style, where she selects vocals for phonetically harmonic effect ahead of whether the lyrics actually are recognizeable words. Now that I think of it, they remind me of a gender-flipped Damo Suzuki except she takes it a step further than he did.

There are also some things I still haven't quite "cracked" about their style, for instance how many of their rather strange song titles really mean anything or in fact refer to obscure Scottish slang. An example would be my surprise to find out that Athol-Brose was a real thing. It also looks like there's a lot of references to Forteana, occultism and witchcraft in their lyrics and aesthetics as uncovered by this blog. You gotta admit that Liz Fraser's eyes kinda make her look like an extraterrestrial-human hybrid... 

...and would any Earthling choose to sing like that?

Edited by Toaster Mantis - January 14 2015 at 13:35