Ghosts With No Homes: A Brief Review Of The Remastered Edition Of The Moon And The Melodies From Cocteau Twins And Harold Budd On 4AD
A singular record even for an imprint with dozens of them, The Moon and the Melodies is being reissued in a remastered form this week by 4AD. Originally released without the name "Cocteau Twins" on it, The Moon and the Melodies -- credited then as now to Harold Budd, Simon Raymonde, Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser -- has become sort of an official Cocteau Twins album over time, even though that downplays the tremendous input from pianist and composer Harold Budd here. Still, however you label it, this 1986 offering remains a masterpiece.
Opener "Sea, Swallow Me" features plaintive keyboards from Budd jostling with Fraser's inimitable vocals. It's elegant in a way that the Cocteaus' own stuff wasn't. The following two instrumentals are the highlights of the record for me still. "Memory Gongs" finds Budd's piano lost in a fog, the notes pointing a way through, nearly in the background of the mix of sounds at times. "Why Do You Love Me" is achingly beautiful to me even now, and I've played it probably hundreds of times. Primarily a duet between Budd's waves of keyboards and Guthrie's piercing guitar-line, the track benefits from a rich sound, as if a great chasm has opened up in front of you and the sound just sort of sweeps forward. I've never heard anything else quite like it and it still is the most emotional bit of so-called ambient music I've ever heard.
Even though I first heard The Moon and the Melodies on cassette, where each side had a vocal track, two instrumentals, and another vocal track, I soon gravitated to the CD. On this edition, the middle two Elizabeth Fraser vocal pieces work best when heard together. The cathartic "Eyes of Mosaics" ends side 1 on the vinyl and tape, but on disc or download it neatly carries a listener into the languid charms of "She Will Destroy You", the one track where it feels as if Fraser's vocal instrument has finally tapped into the same vibe as Budd's treated piano. This selection may be the best number here to highlight the power of those two. Saxophone from Richard Thomas (Dif Juz, Butterfly Child) appears here and carries through nearly the rest of the record.
Instrumentals "The Ghost Has No Home" and "Bloody and Blunt" anchor the final stretch of The Moon and the Melodies. As the longest song by far on this LP, the former really does seem like a Harold Budd composition delicately shoehorned into the alt-pop genre. It contains signature Budd motifs, but it's still marginally concise, built upon both piano-lines and Raymonde's thick bass-lines, and, like "Bloody and Blunt", a cousin to the mood of Victorialand, the Cocteau Twins' studio album from earlier in 1986. The presence of Thomas here is another link, and nowhere does The Mood and the Melodies feel more like Victorialand than on this stretch of the record. It's only in the final moments of album closer "Ooze Out and Away, Onehow" that vocals from Fraser exult with real force and power.
All that being said, I love this one maybe more now than I did then, which is saying something. There's no other record in the discographies of either Harold Budd or the Cocteau Twins like this. And this 2024 remaster has restored a brightness to the material which was not as noticeable as before. The warmth was always there if you listened for it, but now the material positively glistens. I've heard it on multiple formats already and it remains as remarkable as in 1986, if not more so.
The output of Cocteau Twins was once described as baroque, and I can see that. If that's the case, then this is their romantic record, the Sibelius to the earlier Bach efforts. The Moon and the Melodies is an album I can't listen to in segments, nor throw tracks on mixes; It demands attention as a whole release and that's a quality to be appreciated and applauded. Harold Budd, Simon Raymonde, Robin Guthrie, and Elizabeth Fraser really created something magical here, with each venturing just a bit outside their own comfort zone. The precision of the presentation only heightens the emotions within the sides, and the entire effort stands as at least this reviewer's favorite effort from the musicians assembled, I think.
The Moon and the Melodies can be pre-ordered on vinyl, CD, or streaming from the 4AD official store.
[Photos courtesy of 4AD]