Album: This Mortal Coil, This Mortal Coil (4AD)

A "Gothic dream-pop supergroup" led by 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell, This Mortal Coil established a style of brooding chamber-pop from which would derive subsequent ruminative indie strains like shoegazing.

The project began as a vehicle for Ivo's personal taste, with Tim Buckley and Big Star songs prominent in its repertoire - notably the exquisite cover of Buckley's "Song To The Siren" - while various Cocteau Twins and members of Dead Can Dance formed the core of the musical realisations. It proved important in the reaffirmation of certain hippie principles - folk purity, psychedelic imagination, prog ambition - in the wake of punk's blanket scorched-earth eradication of prior styles. This 4CD compilation of the TMC oeuvre, though ponderous and solemn at times, displays an influential interest in texture over the imperatives of pop songcraft, reaching its fullest realisation with the often overlooked third album Blood.

Download This: Song To The Siren; Another Day; The Jeweller; I Am The Cosmos