Five or six years ago, my overarching mission in life was to acquire copies of Cocteau Twins’ final two albums – 1993’s Four-Calendar Cafe and 1995’s Milk & Kisses – on vinyl. I always like having some sort of record grail search on the go, even if the days of actually being able to spend time checking out record stores are long gone.

This one shouldn’t have been that hard – both were Record Store Day 2017 releases and even though they were limited edition and Europe-only, I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to find a leftover copy somewhere at a non-extortionist price. As it turns out, it took almost a year including physical crate digging in Toronto, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo before I finally had both in my possession, both ordered from overseas.

Naturally, both got non-limited reissues in 2019 but being single disc editions, I wasn’t too fussed about past efforts spent. I didn’t expect, however, that there would be even newer editions coming out next year – the band’s longtime label 4AD has acquired the North American rights to the two records from Capitol/Fontana/Universal and will be putting out new editions of both on January 12 of next year, with this key selling point:

For the reissues, Robin Guthrie has returned to his original studio mixes and delivered stunning, brand new 24-bit masters of both titles

Cocteau Twins: “Four-Calendar Café’ and ‘Milk & Kisses’ US Reissues @ 4AD

I don’t find any particular sonic fault with the existing masters, but obviously I’m curious.

“Tishbite” was the first single from Milk & Kisses, released in two parts in March 1996. It was included in the singles compilations Lullabies To Violaine (2006) and Treasure Hiding (2018).