Ray Of Light
The first new music in 13 years from the former Cocteau Twin.
Sun’s Signature ★★★★ Sun’s Signature PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP
IN 2012, during a vanishingly rare interview, Elizabeth Fraser was asked whether she ever had any teenage dreams of leaving her hometown, Grangemouth. “No, I never thought of the next day,” she said. “I just had a lot of something – what was it? So much sun, I suppose, running through me. All this wonderful sun! An Apollonian spirit, if that is a word.”
If that was the light that guided her towards her time in Cocteau Twins, it has often been hidden in the 25 years since the band fell apart. There have only been intermittent flickers since, through guest appearances (Massive Attack, Jónsi, Oneohtrix Point Never among them), occasional music for museum installations and soundtracks, and 2009 single Moses. Sun’s Signature, a collaboration with her partner Damon Reece (long-time member of Spiritualized and drummer with Massive Attack), started to coalesce when they played Anohni’s Meltdown in 2012; 10 years later, some of those songs have been captured to their satisfaction, the product of a meticulous – or maybe perfectionist – process.
Given how long Reece and Fraser have been keeping the five tracks on Sun’s Signature close, they could have succumbed to a worrying airlessness, but they rarely sound overworked, their precision instead creating layered depths and delicate intricacy on the slow evolutions of Apples or Golden Air. Fraser’s voice, higher and more tightly tethered than before, no longer threatens to spin off into the ether in a delirium – there’s even something close to a moment of spoken word on Bluedusk – but it has lost none of its impact nor its beauty. Beyond the ominous synthesized undercurrents, the instrumentation – timpani, woodwind, vibraphone – often has a surprising theatricality, the hint of orchestra pit lending an unexpected hushed intimacy, while outside players, including former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett on three of these prog-beholden tracks, expand Fraser and Reece’s bubble without bursting it.
Time, fittingly, plays curious tricks on Sun’s Signature, songs switching between rapid time-lapse and treacly slow-motion, sometimes existing in the vivid varicoloured moment (“the morning is come!”) sometimes wandering in the past. “Summer is gone/The autumn of my life,” sings Fraser on Paranoid Android torch song Underwater, a track first seeded on a limitededition white label 22 years ago. Bluedusk, meanwhile, a Broadcast-tinged lullaby constructed around “lyrical excerpts” from Anohni, exists in the moment where today slips into yesterday.
The closing Make Lovely The Day sounds like an ancient madrigal, Hackett’s Spanish guitar bending and bowing around Fraser’s voice: “See him rise/And make lovely the day”. There might only be five songs here, but each one has a similar transformative effect – welcome evidence that, despite Fraser disappearing behind the clouds, all that wonderful sun has not dimmed yet.