Pearly dew drops

As the enormous music fans we are, it is a genuine pleasure when we happen across an established artist who we instantly fall in love with. It doesn't happen all that often, so we appreciate it that much more when it does. It's the excitement of knowing you have years, possibly decades of material to delve into and explore at your leisure, blended with the mild annoyance at yourself or the universe for not having came across said artist sooner. Last night we were doing our usual early-hours-should-be-writing-essay-let's-troll-last.fm-instead activity and ended up on the page for one of the finest movie soundtrack proferrings we've heard in a long while, "Under Your Spell" by Desire. A pulsating dream of purple melancholy - sometimes we can't believe what we write - it is one of those songs you can dive, head-first in to. Someone, in the comments, suggested the song was reminiscent of the Cocteau Twins. We had heard of the band before but had limited knowledge; they were Scottish, they were eighties and they featured Elizabeth Fraser who ashamedly we only knew from her work with Massive Attack. In fact, we saw her live as a guest vocalist for the band back in February 2008. 


It was 2am, we were getting tired of flitting between our playlist for Bollox tonight and 50 Words for Snow, and you know when you just want some new music? Something brand new you have no preconceptions of and holding the promise of bringing wonderful audiogasms to our ears. Wikipedia it was. Greatest hits? A compilation from 2000, tracked down on iTunes. Oh wow, we have £4.83 left from a gift card, meaning we'd be paying around £3 for the chance of amazing new music? 


An hour later.


WOWWWWWWWWW.


Who the fuck are the Cocteau Twins and why did no one tell us to listen to them sooner? Audio landscapes of cosmos and shooting stars, wailing and begging and pleading from the voice of an angel, multitudes of those crazy little melody clusters which seem engineered in order to press those specific buttons which in turn make your legs go weak, your heart beat faster, your head fill up with saline solution and your eyes roll backwards. A privileged and entirely pleasurable experience, right now we are at that prized position of hearing a sample of an artist's work with the promise of albums upon albums to explore much further. We're still playing the greatest hits on loop and we feel in the context of their work picking single tracks out of the setting we heard them in wouldn't entirely do them justice. But we've put one track we keep returning to at the top. See what you think. Chastise us for not getting in to them sooner or do yourself an enormous favour and check them out right now. Believe us, we only wish someone had told us this a long time ago.