Cocteau Twins: Four Calendar Café LP

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Four Calendar Café, the seventh and penultimate studio album by Cocteau Twins, has just turned thirty and in January, 4AD will reissue both it and the 1996 follow-up, Milk & Kisses, in the United States on black vinyl. This will mark the first official vinyl pressing outside of Europe. Robin Guthrie returned to his original studio mixes and has delivered stunning, brand new 24-bit masters of both titles.

Named after a passage in William Least Heat-Moon’s book Blue Highways in which he rates eateries by the number of calendars they have hanging, 1993’s Four Calendar Café was the first of two Cocteau Twins albums released via Fontana / Capitol Records after their long association with 4AD ended on a high with 1990’s landmark LP, Heaven or Las Vegas.

Like most Cocteau Twins works before it, Four Calendar Café was recorded and produced by the band, this time at their September Sound studio on the banks of the Thames in West London. A beautiful yet bittersweet record featuring the singles ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Evangeline’ and ‘Summerhead’, the band manifest maturity and fragility in equal measure and while Liz’s lyrics remain cryptic, she’s purposefully being more intelligible and honest. Complete with a memorable design of inanimate objects by the I Spy children’s book creator Walter Wick, Four Calendar Café still stands tall going in to its fourth decade.