Track Listing

1. When Mama Was Moth
2. Five Ten Fiftyfold
3. Sugar Hiccup
4. In Our Angelhood
5. Glass Candle Grenades
6. In the Gold Dust Rush
7. Tinderbox (Of a Heart)
8. Multifoiled
9. My Love Paramour
10. Musette and Drums

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83039 in Music
• Released on: 2003-06-03
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered

Album Description
2003 4AD reissue of 1983 album remastered by guitarist Robin Guthrie.

Customer Reviews

"I weighed my life and it's got me old fool gold."
Although The Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine deservedly enjoy the accolades accompanying their respective positions as pioneers of the shoegazer genre pervasive in the late 1980s, the JMC's fellow Scots, Cocteau Twins, can be identified as a crucial component in the (semi-) popularisation of the style.

Following the departure of bassist and founding member Will Heggie, Head Over Heels relies almost exclusively on the Twins' two strongest suits: Robin Guthrie's often-abstruse guitar production, and Elizabeth Fraser's wraithlike vocals (which she lent most famously to the 1998 Massive Attack single 'Teardrop') and indiscernible lyrics.

The result is something of a synthesis of the trite precepts of punk, rock, dream pop and new wave combined to otherworldly effect. Although far removed from it's ominous predecessor Garlands (1982), Head Over Heels paradoxically both maintained the (considerable) critical and (modest) commercial appreciation the band had previously garnered, and signalled the dawning of a band honing their influential sound.

A central ambivalence in the album's sound is that although Fraser's iridescent vocals could pass as lullaby ('Sugar Hiccup'), Guthrie's coextensive opaque guitar layerings and vapourous arpeggios ('Glass Candle Grenades') are often their very antithesis. The variance works however, as the album sweeps effortlessly from would-be requiem (the dirge-like 'The Tinderbox (of a heart)' and would-be jazz ('Multifoiled') to would-be U2 ('My Love Paramour') and back again.

Indeed, Robert Fripp (King Crimson) and The Edge (U2) are as present in Guthrie's guitar as Will Reid and Kevin Shields (The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine respectively).

Fraser's voice is the central attraction however, with a transcendent quality that can be deciphered in the work of vocalists as diverse as Jeff Buckley (with whom she was romantically involved), Bjork, Thom Yorke (Radiohead) and Chino Moreno (Deftones).

Okay. Bad remastering.
The songs on this album are good. Unfortuneatly, I learned that the remastering left something to be desired in the mid-range of most of the album. I do not own a copy of the original, however, I would purchase that instead.

Leave Siouxie out of this!
Ignore the whiny naysayer that cried a river because the Cocteau Twins "weren't anything like Siouxie & The Banshees"...By the end of the CT's career they were better than they ever were, whilst S&TB were pop-encrusted shadows of their former selves and glory.

This is one of their top three albums (if not their best, competeing with the PINK OPAQUE and THE MOON & THE MELODIES). Still can't stand the track "Sugar Hiccup", though...definitely the least favourable on the album.