A Film Canon

The masterpiece of Dream Pop, Heaven Or Las Vegas perfects the Cocteau Twins' evocation of the moment at which language evaporates, moving beyond the incomprehensibility of Treasure to present a texture that coalesces around words as if by accident; or, rather, characterises them as little more than the accidental by-products of a sonic fractal, whose infinite reiterations are merely opened, rather than contained, by the band. The result is a vision of the world immediately before it is bracketed by language; a sensory bombardment that imbues everything with the everlasting, pyrotechnic sunset of Las Vegas, gesturing towards the sublimity - and ambiguity - of consciousness. Even more beautifully, it is a vision of language just before it is bracketed by language, of words as a sensory, rather than semiotic, phenomenon - the lurid maraschino cherry that vocalist Elizabeth Fraser rolls around her mouth, with insatiable delight. From this perspective, the band's decision to name themselves after the French surrealist may have less to do with his shared taste for dream states than with the irreducible, inexplicable beauty of his name, while their ultimate gesture is to explicate music as the attempt to give colour to the blind.