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Victorialand by: Cocteau Twins

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Rating: - sooo beautiful

sooooo beautiful-their most quiet and gentle and least constructed album-written and recorded very fast and poss without the base player simon raymonde-not sure if thats true now after all these yrs-but seem to remeber that might be the case-anyway it has a diff sound and feel to it than most of their material-its very slow,quiet,gentle,calming music-almost like another brian eno's work -it came after moon and the melodies where they wrote and performed an album with harold budd-a very old pianist and philip glass like musician-so maybe that lead to this slightly odd album and its slightlymellow sound-however i love and adore this album-it never bores me as it lacks the nasty simple disco type poppy rythms of heaven or las vegas and i love this album to bits-infact it is def one of their best 3 ever with blue bell knoll and treasure -however it was under appreciated by the public and critics circa 1986 -but its so soft and slow and beautiful-perfection

Rating: - The Cocteau,s jettison the incandescent glories of old for more serene territory.The results are the same....bliss unconfined.

Speaking as someone who would have crawled across broken glass using my tongue as a propeller just to hear a new Cocteau Twins album I was a bit disappointed when I first heard Victorialand. It lacks the epic peaks and troughs of their previous album, the magnificent Treasure and indeed the three E.P,s released between Treasure and this album Aikea-Guinea, Tiny Dynamine / Echoes in a Shallow Bay. With bassist Simon Raymonde off recording on This Mortal Coil's Filigree & Shadow and the faithful old drum machine sat in the corner gathering dust Victorialand is a lighter airier album than previous efforts. It lacks the incandescent glories of their best work but once you get used to the fact that you are listening to a calmer( lazy calmer?) and more reflective work than the giddy extraterrestrial pop of old you realise this is an extraordinarily beautiful album .
The lack of percussion and the sculptural booming bass lines means there is far more space and tracts of spatial calm Richard Thomas of Dif Juz fills in some of this with his woozy saxophone and Tablas but mostly it's the glistening guitar refrains of Robin Guthrie and of course the extraordinary voice of Elizabeth Fraser that give Victorialand it's exceptional ambience.
First track "Lazy Calm " glides the emollient saxophone over exquisitely plucked guitar notes and the serene vocals that twitter for the chorus of sorts. "Fluffy Tufts" may be a song title so twee it would make a children's TV presenter blanch but it is a truly gorgeous track with the multi-tracked vocals pirouetting over cascading notes that briefly recall the effulgent rhapsodies of Treasure. Even a more austere track like "Whales Tails " is truly dazzling, though in more precise structured manner..at least till Fraser's vocals gambol away briefly ."Oomingmak" brazenly highlights Fraser's amazing vocal range to wondrous effect and even if "Little Spacey " is a little too waltz like the faultless exhortations of "Feet Like Fins" and the shimmering fateful tones of "The Thinner The Air " means the album is book-ended by a musical virtuosity so very rare for it's stop you in your tracks beauty.
The album title refers to the part of Antarctica known as Victoria Land ,named after Queen Victoria (and forming the British claim to the continent, currently dormant under international treaty). Several song titles seem to have polar themes which gives it added interest for me, an avid student of polar exploration.."How to Bring a Blush to the Snow" is pretty obvious. "Feet-Like Fins", is in all probability about penguins. "Throughout the Dark Months of April and May", could be about the beginning of the South Polar winter, the obvious "Whales Tails" about errr the tails of whales and "Oomingmak" is an Inuit name for the Musk Ox. "The Thinner the Air" could allude to the fact that much of the continent is more than 3 kilometres above sea level and at this altitude air becomes noticeably thinner.
An intoxicating drift into ambient territory Victorialand was followed by The Harold Budd collaboration The Moon And The Melodies. Which further confirmed this coast towards the outer extremes of mood music .I love ambient music ,despite my cursory initial reservations I was always going to love this album. Rather than ravel the listener in an exhilarating miasma of thrumming pop/rock textures Victorialand lowers them into a idyllic ocean of lapping eddies. With the Cocteau's the results are invariably the same.. ..bliss unconfined.

Rating: - Yes the remaster is worth it...An old gem newly polished...

Other reviewers have tried to describe this album, and I can only say "buy it" to anyone who appreciates beautiful things...
All I really wanted to say is for fans of the twins who bought this over 20 years ago(old, aren't we?)...the production of some of the original albums was lacking, especially this one and treasure.
The remaster presents this piece in a new light. If you are listening on decent equipment this really has more separation and vibrancy to the guitars, sax, effects etc and Liz's voice has less of a veil in front of it...it's almost like hearing it for the first time again.
Guthrie's remaster is a gift to the fans but you will be hard pressed to find the tiny credit of this on the case...typically modest.

Achingly beautiful....

Rating: - Ethereal chamber-pop with hints of darker ambience

Victorialand is an album that still manages to sound absolutely alien - even when analysed within the context of the Cocteau's career - with it's mixture of ethereal chamber-pop and a style of music that seems both medieval and futuristic in equal measures; building upon the sound and style of previous albums like Head Over Heels and Treasure, whilst simultaneously pushing things forwards into previously unexplored musical territories. The overall sound of the album here is much more lulled and minimal than on any of their previous records, with the departure of regular bassist Simon Raymonde leading to a collaboration with musician Richard Thomas and a greater reliance on more exotic instrumental arrangements, for example, the lengthy bursts of saxophone on opening track Lazy Calm, and the intoxicating use of tablas during the beautifully-titled, Feet-like Fins.

Often this album is referred to as the band's "acoustic-album", which is a little miss leading, as the music here hardly brings to mind MTV's Unplugged... however, I suppose the tag is justifiable to an extent, with Victorialand certainly sounding less rock-like than previous albums. Instead, the music seems to reflect the artwork (and vice-versa... often the case with the Cocteau's)... that muddy melange of colours and textures, moods and emotions, the vague shapes that seem to make sense the more you analyse them, and so on. It also alludes to that region of Antarctica (so eloquently described by other commentators), with the music having a vast, cold and ethereal feel to it, suggesting space and emotional landscape, rather than the obvious moods and emotions we would normally associate with pop.

The titles of the songs are also a clear indication to the style of music found within, with songs like Fluffy Tufts, Oomingmak and Little Spacey suggesting a beautiful and strange sense of nonsense, which is reflected in Elizabeth Fraser's gorgeous vocal work, which here stretches beyond the normal boundaries of what the human voice should be capable of, and shows a definite influence on performers like Dolores O'Riordan, Alison Goldfrapp and Björk; who can't help but seem inferior in comparison!? Her delivery of words and use of phrasing, which turns the lyrics into babbled cascading gibberish has always been one of the major draws to the Cocteau's sound, with further musical influences seen on later albums like Loveless by My Bloody Valentine (there creating that similar, intoxicating style of alien-pop so prevalent on Cocteau's albums like Treasure, Heaven or Las Vegas and this) and on the first four albums by Icelandic band Sigur Ros.

Rating: - Not A Classic...

Hmm...A number of reviews seem to rate this as one of the Cocteau's best. I can't really agree. If Im not mistaken, Liz Frazer said that, by this point in the Cocteau's history, they had begun to parody themselves, and it sounds like it to me, their weakest set. Built on a preponderance of Maj7 chords, it feels like they are treading old ground. Added to that, the brevity of the album is not a plus. It still retails at a normal price point, (and did at the time of release, I can personally vouch). Where are the startling cresendos, the light and shade, the sounds of angels giving it hell? The Cocteaus are better than aimless ambience. Rather listen to Blue Bell Knoll, Treasure, et al. Even Four-Calendar Cafe is better than this one.

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