"Cherry-Coloured Funk" I remember when this came out that the line everyone seemed to take on the Cocteau Twins was that Elizabeth Fraser wasn't really singing words, just making lovely noises.
Guess what? Yeah well, but anyway, they're definitely hard to make out, even when you're trying to track along right word for word. I also found out that this was the bestselling single album of their career, which spanned 1979-1997, and that it was their last for 4AD. All I knew at the time was that it was gorgeous and enchanting if alarmingly vaporous, difficult to recall to mind well when I was apart from it. In fact, I had a habit for several weeks of putting it on daily with the intention of getting to the bottom of this once and for all. Then that chopping, plodding attack to "Cherry-Coloured Funk" would start and about 30 seconds in Fraser would swoop to the lovely note and join herself in lilting counterparts and my concentration scattered, distracted or buoyed or both by the ineffable. It's hard to say that this is exactly comprehending music, or whether it's rather more something like finding a suitable background soundtrack to ignore. But now when I hear it again I know perfectly well, like muscle memory, what dodges and feints each song will take in the seconds before it does so and all the hooks and notes and various tricks. And it's indelibly connected with the feelings and experiences of the time when I was listening to it so slavishly, a mostly unremarkable period yet with its triumphs and disappointments and unique whatsits, the like of which I shall never again, etc. I always thought of this as the one from their well-stocked catalog that I just happened to land on, all of the rest of it equally distinguished based on what I heard, which just might be to say equally undistinguished, except by the force of what's brought to bear.
