Watch Liz's mouth while she sings. Watch it and pay attention: the vibrato of the strings that extends like a timid tremor on the lips is the doorway through which the soul breathes. Liz Fraser bears the stigmata of divinity. She is destined to be awarded the most precious recognition, that of being the greatest light music singer in the world. The reasons should not be sought in the more famous repertoire that, through Massive Attack, gave life to the theme of a successful American series or that through This Mortal Coil, posthumously gave merits to Tim Buckley with a cover that surpassed the original in fame and success: these late trials have contributed to making Liz's voice famous beyond British borders, but they are certainly not the brightest firmament capable of accounting for the absolute musical revolution that the Scottish singer interpreted over the years. It is in the Cocteau Twins, the legendary group that introduced her to the English-speaking audience of the '80s, that the key to reading her divine talent lies, the avant-garde of which she became the bearer, surpassing Meredith Monk's lectio in putting her vocal experiments at the service of popular music without diminishing her luminous art.
The career of the Cocteau Twins, like that of most musical bands, follows the path of a Gaussian distribution: flat at the extremes and with a peak in the center. We are simplifying: in reality, both the exquisitely post-punk beginnings of "Garlands" and "Head Over Heels" and the last attempts of the '90s, though declining from "Heaven or Las Vegas" to "Milk and Kisses" passing through "Four-Calendar Café" are not works to be discarded, but they probably do not equal the works of artistic maturity that accompanied much of the '80s. "Treasure" first and "Victorialand" later are the albums that seal the pinnacle of the famous "dreamy" sound with which Liz's voice soared towards the musical Empyrean where the deities of all times remain due to their everlasting talent.
Liz, through her voice, became the interpreter of a musical revolution in which she developed three types of singing deconstruction. Take the mournful melody of "Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires" from the good "Heaven or Las Vegas" of 1990 and listen carefully to the chorus sung by Fraser as if it were an uninterrupted overtone singing:
Singed by it, pulled around of my blazening
Eyes on the usually science of cherry-colored
Limelight not the music it's plain as as can be so
All of the time I improvise by making sure
It's to wait for you
This is the mature Liz in which the singing is mostly understandable and it is not an impossible task to intuit the words of one of her songs. But by spending a little more attention required to understand the text, it becomes clear that the construction of the sentence is stumbling and tangled and although certain images like "the glowing eyes" and "the cherry-colored limelight" are thunderous, we struggle to put together the pieces to interpret the meaning. Here Liz operates a syntactic deconstruction. Her singing is metrically perfect, but to become so, it needs to free itself from syntactic conventions that limit the vocal expressionism of which she is a magnificent interpreter.
Now take that miraculous epiphany of the absurd which is "Carolyn’s Fingers" from "Blue Bell Knoll": Liz lets esoteric trills soar into the ether, deliberately deforming the text and transcending it through precious locutions that seem like magical and occult formulas.
When he said, 'You are full of love'
She fell down into this dirty mess
Some people see me laugh and tell us
'It's wrong to make fun of me'
The syntax this time is clear and linear. But it will be enough to hear Liz sing to understand that the Scottish singer has different words in mind and mouth. It’s all a succession of apocopes, epentheses, anaptyxes, and other phonetic improvisations with which Fraser decomposes and shapes the text, subjected to the need to forge a lyrical singing using a language where the sound of the word plays the main role. This is the phonetic deconstruction with which Liz starts from a reliable script to distort it and make it even more ethereal and imaginative through her magical personal dictionary.
Further intensifying the vocal experiments that exploded in the legendary "Treasure" and shortly afterward in the impalpable and silky "Victorialand", right at the moment of the group’s creative and qualitative peak, Liz and the two faithful Cocteau Twins companions decide to collaborate with the avant-garde musician Harold Budd who at that time is developing a form of minimal ambient, strong in collaborations with the usual omnipresent Brian Eno ("Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror" of 1980 and "The Pearl" of 1984) and an unmistakable musical style that molds liquid dream dimensions through constant and calibrated use of the piano pedal. What comes out is "The Moon and the Melodies", a happy experiment that seems to perfectly blend two different declinations of a "dreamy sound" that leans on one side to "light" mixtures with pop-rock and on the other to instrumental solutions filled with holographic and ambient atmospheres. Although the eight tracks of the album are equally credited to both the Scottish band and the American composer, the balanced division of the album’s tracks between four songs sung by Fraser and four instrumentals lets one imagine where the hand of the Cocteau Twins or that of Harold Budd thrives more. And in all four pieces to which Liz lends her usual magical and cryptic vocals, it is admirable to note how this time the Scot performs an even more extreme form of deconstruction where now any semblance of text has been replaced by a remarkable example of glossolalia at an ideal meeting point between Gregorian chant and a series of childish babbles. No, let’s not speak of grammelot or scat, as we would almost risk diminishing the most misleading and precious of the arts: just listen to "Sea, Swallow Me" at the opening of the album to understand that Liz in her dark storytelling, means something else. Although there is not a word among the audible ones that has a complete sense, that wish to be swallowed by the sea is there, before our eyes and in the presence of our ears, thunderously vivid and made tangible by a storytelling that through the pure sound of the word has the power to paint images. It is the linguistic deconstruction the most extreme point of Liz's vocal experimentation, the technique of artistic maturity with which the Scottish singer realizes that the text is indeed an accessory on which to embroider the trimmings of her daring babblings. The same concept is reiterated by the other sung tracks of the album, from the murky and bittersweet melody of “She Will Destroy You” to the emotional crescendo of “Ooze Out and Away, Onehow”, passing through that small masterpiece of “Eyes are Mosaics” where Fraser sings a dizzying nursery rhyme in two voices that materializes before our eyes children's games and joyful dances. The rest honors Harold Budd’s usual accurate craft as a creator of environmental holograms, who has the not-so-trivial merit of composing and playing four pieces with distinct and recognizable scents, where the beautiful saxophone by Richard Thomas of Dif Juz stands out in “The Ghost Has No Home” and the dramatic dialogue between piano arpeggios and Guthrie’s “ambient” guitar in “Why Do You Love Me?”. The American composer is the magnificent added value that provides the right ground in which the sound of the Cocteau Twins can prosper and with it the supreme talent of Liz Fraser.
Watch Liz while singing “Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops”: there is a moment when, in the refrain, the voice doubles between singing and counter-singing and the mind is deceived by this enchantment to the point of not knowing where the voices originate to then diverge. It’s a deception, a puzzle, a spell. Liz has blue eyes and the beautiful diastema embedded in her lips. Not a word to say, but everything not said she has extraordinarily sung.
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