lullabies to violaine

just got vol 1 of this Cocteau twins collection of mostly 12 inch tracks. love the CTs and had all their cds and the vinyl extras, so in a way this is a bit redundant but I had heard that a good remastering job had been done on this. trouble is, to me the treble sounds painfully sharp - particularly on Quisquose, which at any volume is ear-shredding. anyone else come across this?

 

Yup. Low budget recordings by an 80s indie band complete with trebly bass (in vogue at the time), heavily chorused guitars and nasty and excessive reverb on everything. I never heard the originals on CD (ony Vinyl) but as remasters go, this sounds like a step backwards to me. Maybe the source material is just too thin to really improve, but I'd have thought that by the time they reached Cico Buff they would have had a reasonable budget for studio time at least. Ah well. Another marketing ruse. Back to the black plastic.

 

I was a fan of them in the 80's - but I find it hard to listen to their stuff now -all seems a bit dated...

however, their album 'Victorialand' is a masterpice and I still play that nowadays...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Victorialan...f=pd_ka_1/203-1185210-6387168?ie=UTF8&s=music

 

Not heard it but I bet its not as bad a production as Jesus & Mary Chain's 'Psychocandy', since we're talking ear shredding early 80s indie....thank god their later stuff improved and they went for a less harsh production style.

 

great album though - my vinyl copy is still pretty listenable despite having been played on a student deck with a few pennies sellotaped to the headshell to stop it jumping...

 

i bought recently some wierd swiss reissue of the first 2 CT albums on one CD, crap sound, good tunes. definitely to be listened on vinyl, prefferably on older LP12 that is perfectly voiced for this kind of musak. the same goes for this mortal coil and dead can dance, actually for most of older 4AD catalogue.

 

4AD. for analogue disc.

 

I expect it is good but I always feel compelled to turn it off after a few minutes, just far too much distortion and white noise for me (and coming from a Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins fan thats gotta be bad surely!). I expect it sounds much less harsh on worn vinyl than my CD though! I put the CD on at Isaacs and it had him gritting his teeth and pulling a pained expression after about five seconds