4AD US Vinyl & CDs

Review: Milk & Kisses proved to be the final studio album by the inimitable Scottish band Cocteau Twins, the band that made the 4AD label long before the likes of Dry Cleaning and Future Islands graced their roster. By the time in 1996 that they'd released this, however, album number eight, they'd moved on to major Fontana Records and were well into the period of their career where singer Elizabeth Fraser had switched to singing words rather than expressing herself through sounds alone. Not necessarily the happiest time for the band, who reportedly avoided each other during its recording, but still some of the dreamiest dream pop about at the time. Includes the song 'Rilkean Heart' which was penned about the late Jeff Buckley, a lifelong devotee of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Review: Four Calendar Cafe is a latter-day LP from dream pop pioneers Cocteau Twins, now reissued by their home stretch 4AD (though it first appeared as a defection to Dutch label Fontana). Though it isn't an album of high priority in the average Cocteau canon, this very fact proves that the average Cocteau enjoyer can be differentiated from the patrician cream. That's all due to the fact that Four-Calendar Cafe oozes a maturity that only a seventh full-length album could muster, infamously swerving away from the ambient indeterminacy of their prior albums and veering into greater accessibility and popcraft, with the likes of 'Evangeline' and 'Bluebeard' garnering the band moderate success in the charts.