 Cocteau Twins The Richard Bachman to Tiny Dynamine's Stephen King, Echoes in a Shallow Bay provides the dark underbelly to that EP with some of the Cocteau Twins' most menacing sounds ever. It's probably the Cocteau disc of choice for the Anne Rice crowd, though admittedly, I go much more for the "pretty stuff." 1985 was a fluxy, experimental year for the band, and what dark shit they were channelling here I can not even speculate. But it conjures the feeling of having all your blood drained from your body by a beautiful vampiress, leaving you in a blissfully slow, painful death-grip, unable to move, unable to speak, departing the world with a horrified smile on your face. So if Tiny Dynamine is a strong waft of opium, Echoes in a Shallow Bay is a miserable, beautiful, incapacitating dose of GHB. A little dangerous, deeply distrubing, quite cloudy, and rather unpleasant … but fascinating and fabulous all the same.
Review by Dagwood Donnell |