Cocteau Twins | Heaven or Las Vegas

On September 17th, 1990, dreampop and shoegaze genre innovators Cocteau Twins released their critically acclaimed 6th studio album Heaven or Las Vegas.

The album was the last record to be released via 4AD records before the band moved onto the much larger and mainstream Capital Records for their next two records.

On the album’s creation, bassist Simon Raymonde told The Skinny during a career spanning interview a few years ago:

“It was a really weird time; while the music was amazing and great fun to be a part of, together Robin and I wrote some of our best tunes and separately too, he wrote a couple all on his own and I wrote a couple all on my own and when he added things to mine it made them better and vice versa. We were in a very good space musically but we were putting so much time and effort into the music, it was trying to mask all the other shit that was going on that we didn’t want to stop and think about for too long. But the drug problem did get absolutely out of hand by the end of the recording of Heaven or Las Vegas and that obviously led to the rehab period which we moved into shortly afterwards.”

The album’s lead single “Ice-Blink Luck”, is definitely the most pop-friendly of all the band’s songs and begun the new trend of singer Elizabeth Fraser actually writing and singing intelligible lyrics, as the opposed to the melange of sounds taking from several languages, and natural history books covering Entomology.

In our list of the 100 best Dream Pop Records, our editor Frank Deserto had this to say about the album:

“Arguably their magnum opus, Cocteau Twins were already on the top of their game for several years running by the time they released their sixth full-length record, their last for 4AD. It marks a latter-day peak in the band’s career as well as a dividing line, propelling the band further into alternative subconscious and employing both the catchiest set of tunes and the most intelligible lyrics Elizabeth Fraser would sing to date, mainly inspired by the birth of daughter Lucy Belle. The sweeping title track aside, the album’s bookends are chock full of slow, burning embers that wrap the rest of the record up in a shimmering, finespun bow.”

Watch the video for the album’s title track below:

Watch the full concert above from the Town Country Club, from November 1st, 1990. (The audio is synced from a Detroit concert)

Below is a note from the Youtuber who remastered the footage with synced audio, along with the setlist, enjoy!

“I’ve remastered the original Cocteau Twins London video and synched it to the superior remastered soundboard recording of the same show in Detroit. I was able to improve the video quality considerably and provide more depth to the colors. Fortunately, the video was shot well, by someone who knew the songs. Syncing was possible because the Twins used backing tracks that played in perfect time.”