Cocteau Twins

Elizabeth Fraser's voice is the most singular instrument in the Cocteau Twins' sonic world, and the Cocteau Twins' sonic world is itself extraordinary: dense, reverb-saturated, Robin Guthrie's guitars processed to the point of abstraction, Simon Raymonde's bass more felt than heard, and over all of it Fraser inventing a language that was not quite any language but carried the emotional weight of all of them. They began in 1979 in Grangemouth, Scotland, as a sparse post-punk unit, and became, over a decade of records, one of the most completely realized sonic environments in British music. Fraser and Guthrie also gave This Mortal Coil its best-known recording, "Song to the Siren" (1983).

Heaven or Las Vegas (1990) is the record that crystallized everything: production dense enough to be physically immersive, songs that function as emotional weather rather than narrative, Fraser's vocals — on "Cherry-Coloured Funk," on "Iceblink Luck" — so intensely characterized that you don't need to understand the words to know exactly what is meant. The Cocteau Twins never explained themselves and resisted categorization at every stage. Their influence runs through every band in the dream-pop and shoegaze canons, less through specific techniques than through their insistence that emotional immersion was a legitimate artistic aim.