If nothing towers above the rest like "Song to the Siren" did, the tradeoff lies in the record's feeling of dramatic concentration. But even that's too simplistic a summary on an album ranging, seemingly haphazardly, from the murky atmospherics of "Fyt" to the blunt, mechanistic rockout making up their version of Wire member Colin Newman's "Not Me".įiligree & Shadow from 1986 comes across as a more unified effort in comparison, released as a double album and with each of its four sides planned as a self-contained unit, songs flowing one into the other. The voice of Tears is, if anyone, Cindytalk's Gordon Sharp, ranging from operatic bravura on the opening cover of Big Star's "Kanga Roo" to the closing tenderness of "A Single Wish". It's to his credit that his stated ambition to not simply have a 4AD house band actually came true.
First recorded as a B-side for TMC's debut single from 1983, "Song to the Siren"'s success prompted Watts-Russell to continue with a full-length. The first album, 1984's It'll End in Tears, can't escape being dominated by the group's most famous track- "Song to the Siren", a song by Tim Buckley recorded for his album Starsailor and recast by Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie into a gripping vocal-and-guitar-only performance that has since completely overshadowed the original. The project offered a mix of familiar and unknown voices and songs, performers sometimes appearing only for a single song, even simply an instrumental (such as Dead Can Dance associate Peter Ulrich, taking a bow on Filigree & Shadow with the percussion piece "At First, and Then", never to reappear). This approach to production was combined with Watts-Russell's desire to celebrate obscure songs both old and more recent and transform them into something new and stunning.
Producer/engineer John Fryer, Watts-Russell's key collaborator across the releases, helped maintain a mood of poised, shadowy romanticism, part dark ambient grind and part late-night string-laden recital.
#Modern english i melt with you 2011 series
The band's identity came not from a specific individual person or group of people but from a sprawling series of studio efforts, packaged in moody cover designs courtesy of photographer Nigel Grierson and designer Vaughn Oliver and always featuring model Pallas Citroen, a kind of monolithic, black-and-white take on Roxy Music's own remarkable run of covers over an earlier decade. And though founder Ivo Watts-Russell didn't want This Mortal Coil to be seen as a label vanity project, there was nothing more classically "4AD" from a listener's point of view. Despite the presence of so many performers not signed to the label and the fact that nothing else on 4AD actually sounded like This Mortal Coil, nothing else spoke more to the idea of what the label seemed to be. This Mortal Coil, the subject of a new comprehensive box set, was in the public eye an encapsulation of 4AD's sound and style spread out over three albums and associated singles and one-offs.
Right next to these acts on 4AD, meanwhile, was something even more cryptic, a band that never toured, that never really was a band at all: This Mortal Coil. Bauhaus' slashing, poised aggression may have helped kickstart the label, and Modern English created a new wave hit for the ages with "I Melt With You", but after a few years acts like the gauzy Cocteau Twins and the medieval-Europe-gone-global-instruments of Dead Can Dance ended up being the big sellers, especially among those inclined toward pale and interesting looks matched with black clothing. For a while in the 1980s, and to some degree into the following decade, many listeners assumed the London-based 4AD record label was defined by arty goth rock.
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