This Mortal Coil

Since 1983 · United Kingdom

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It'll End in Tears (1984)

Ivo Watts-Russell assembled This Mortal Coil as a 4AD collective, inviting rotating vocalists to perform covers chosen for their resonance with the label's aesthetic — the result is less a record than a sustained mood, each track bleeding into the next in an atmosphere of tenderness and grief. The cover of Tim Buckley's 'Song to the Siren' — sung by Elizabeth Fraser — is one of the most haunting recordings in the 4AD catalog, her voice stretching over reverb-soaked arrangements so spacious the song seems to be happening at a great distance. It established 4AD's sonic identity — fragile, reverberant, emotionally extreme — more completely than any single artist release.

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This Mortal Coil

It'll End in Tears · 1984

This Mortal Coil was Ivo Watts-Russell, the founder of 4AD Records, but it was also, in practice, a rotating collective of nearly every significant artist on 4AD's roster at a given moment — and that institutional context is inseparable from the music. The records — It'll End in Tears (1984), Filigree & Shadow (1986), Blood (1991) — are assemblages: cover versions reanimated as chamber music, original compositions that felt like dreams half-recalled, arrangements that could contain a cello and a drum machine and a soprano in the same bar without incongruity.

The version of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" that opens It'll End in Tears, with Elizabeth Fraser barely touching the notes, became one of the defining recordings of the era — less a cover than a haunting, as if the song had been heard through a wall in someone else's house. This Mortal Coil demonstrated that the 4AD aesthetic — the romantic melancholy, the horror of prettiness, the beauty of dread — was a coherent artistic position rather than a house style.