Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd - The Moon and the Melodies (Remastered) (1986/2024)

×

Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd - The Moon and the Melodies (Remastered) (1986/2024)

Close

On 23rd August, almost forty years after it was initially released, The Moon and the Melodies by Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd is being reissued on vinyl for the first time – remastered, from the original tapes, by Robin Guthrie himself.

The Moon and the Melodies is a singular record within the Cocteau Twins’ catalogue – unusually ethereal, even by their standards, and largely instrumental, guided by the free-form improvisations of Harold Budd, an ambient pioneer who had drifted into their orbit as if by divine intervention. Building on the atmospheric bliss of Victorialand, released earlier the same year, it signaled a possible future for the trio, yet it was a path they’d never take again.

Over the ensuing years, The Moon and the Melodies has attracted a passionate fan base. Its most atmospheric tracks routinely turn up in ambient DJ sets. ‘Sea, Swallow Me’ is one of the Cocteau Twins’ most streamed songs on Spotify, having found a new life on TikTok, where it serves as the soundtrack to innumerable expressions of hard-to-express melancholy.

For such a low-key affair, the album casts a long shadow – but Raymonde believes the record’s uniqueness stems directly from its humble, unpremeditated origins. “It captured a moment in time between friends that are enjoying making music together. Really, that’s the essence of it.”

To coincide with the announcement of this much-demanded repress, Cocteau Twins have also shared, for the first time, a full HD library of their music videos, upgraded using original masters found in both 4AD and Universal Music’s vaults. From 1984’s ‘Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops’ to 1996’s ‘Tishbite,’ these new uploads span the history of the band and excitingly bring a clarity that’s far closer to their original productions than anything that was previously available.

By 1986, the Cocteau Twins had transformed themselves. The group had quickly moved past the arid, post-punk sounds of their 1982 debut album Garlands and their two follow-up full-lengths—the adventurous Head Over Heels (1983) and the masterpiece Treasure (1984)—and were evolving at a rapid pace into something both singular and somewhat undefinable. Having embraced the expansive possibilities of Robin Guthrie's overdriven, multi-tracked guitars and Elizabeth Fraser's glossolalia singing, the Twins' music had gone beyond being simply "dreamy pop" and into a genre all its own, one that embraced melody but rejected both traditional structures and harmonies. Two EPs released simultaneously in late 1985—Echoes in a Shallow Bay and Tiny Dynamine were recorded together during sessions testing out the group's new studio, but not conceived of as a "proper" album—were the first indications that the Cocteau Twins were in an exploratory phase, with lush, ambient textures and an utter disregard for anything resembling verse-chorus-verse songs. By the time the Victorialand album—a percussion-free miasma of ethereal minimalism—was released in spring of 1986, it seemed as though they had abandoned pop-based music altogether.

While the bombastic overload of that fall's Love's Easy Tears EP seemed to indicate a return to Earth, it was quickly followed by The Moon and the Melodies, an album so delicate and ambient in its approach that it wasn't even credited to "Cocteau Twins," but instead bore the names of the group's individual members (Guthrie, Fraser, bassist Simon Raymonde) and, tellingly, Harold Budd. Budd, of course, was the iconic pianist whose spare, sustain-driven approach to the instrument made him a pioneer of early ambient music. (Brian Eno released Budd's debut album on his Obscure label in 1978 and the two would collaborate on Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors [1980] and The Pearl [1984].)

The Moon and the Melodies, despite its billing, is much more "Harold Budd featuring the Cocteau Twins" than it is the other way around. While the sequencing of the set highlights the more Twins-like pieces—it starts off with "Sea, Swallow Me," a melodic, 4/4 piece in which Budd's straightforward piano figures provide counterweight to Fraser's soaring vocals with Guthrie's chiming guitars adding the necessary filigree—the predominant ethos is Budd's warm and enveloping approach to his instrument. Half of the pieces are "ambient" in nature, with no vocals at all, while the other half—with Fraser singing—sound like a cross between the cosmic swoon of Victorialand and the melodic shimmer of Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow Bay. However, Budd's piano features throughout and is the driving (if one can call ambient piano "driving") force here. "Memory Gongs" was so singularly a Harold Budd piece that he would re-use it on his Lovely Thunder album that same year. While it doesn't make for the most seamless collaboration, it does feature some of the Twins' best work, notably "Ooze Out and Away, Onehow," which again finds the group ending an album in epic, overwhelming fashion. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz