Head Over Heels is the best album by Cocteau Twins. The simple reason for that being that it has the most variety in the songwriting. Lack of variety in the songs is always, always, always the number one problem when it comes to dream pop albums and is what separates the good albums of the genre from the mediocre ones.

Head Over Heels is the first album Cocteau Twins created that can truly be considered dream pop, a genre that they of course helped pioneer after moving away from the post-punk gothic rock of their first album, Garlands. Already, Head Over Heels is a gigantic step forward and sees the band developing and completing the sound that they would employ for the rest of their career.

That sound is a simple but effective kind. Robin Guthrie casts waves of elegant, reverberating, droning guitar lines for Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals to soar along on, softly cooing and purring with a considerable amount of force as they ride the waves. It’s a perfect, 100% blended solution and has remained so as dozens of other acts tried the sound for their own.

Perhaps it’s a bit too perfect a sound. You spin a bunch of melodic reverberating basic guitar chords and have a naturally soft and in-tune female vocalist mumble something over them and anything you do will come out pleasant and listenable. But strip away the effects and you often reveal how little substance the songs actually have. They either lack good hooks entirely (important, it’s dream ‘pop’ for a reason), or they ride on that monotonous pretty wave of reverb for the entire album, never changing tempo or alternating their basic song structure.

It’s the most dangerous kind of monotony that, when combined with the soothing textures token to dream pop, makes something that should be genuinely moving into an indistinguishable lullaby that you won’t remember at all once you wake up. Amateurish dream pop is the most amateurish kind of music there is. Two or three probably well-meaning people hear a couple of dream pop albums they like, get a few effects pedals and a decent female vocalist and just pop out an album full of 12 songs that all sound exactly the same, and this happens all the time, and for some reason a lot of these amateur one-trick-pony albums are lauded by music publications because they find one universally pleasant easy-listening sound and run with it for an entire album.

But Head Over Heels reminds one that there are dream pop albums that stand out and are memorable, and the genre is still worth wading through the samey stuff to get to the gem albums where bands actually write individual songs under the pretty atmospheres. To justify all my ranting now real quick, you have the slow haunting ballad “When Mama Was Moth,” the aptly-named sweet and bubbly “Sugar Hiccup,” the uptempo roaring “In Our Angelhood” (you could make a case for it being the first ever shoegaze song, and it’s also my favorite song on here), and the back-alley toe-tapping dance stomp of “Multifoiled.”

In addition to tempo variety there’s also tonal variety. This is overall Cocteau Twins’s darkest dream pop album (one of the personal reasons why it’s my favorite), but you’ve still got bright songs like the aforementioned “Sugar Hiccup” to contrast with the darker ones, like “When Mama Was Moth.” I prefer this in example to later Cocteau Twins albums like Treasure which are more monotone and brighter (I like the dark stuff, as I am clinically depressed).

The album also rounds out at a very nice 37 minutes, so no track drones on for too long and risks bringing the album towards that dreaded lullaby of monotony, because every song ends when it should and the next one always brings something new to the table to perk you up again and take you on another, albeit different, otherworldly trip. I shouldn’t go without mentioning the drum machine. Yeah, a lot of people despise drum machines, but truthfully, they’re buried enough in the mix to not often be a focus point. In fact, the plasticine sound of them actually suits the shimmering guitars and vocals.

The percussion, electronic or not, helps keep this album down to earth so the sonic textures don’t all float away and run into each other, if you know what I mean. It’s necessary to get some of that variety we should all love so much, and the steady consistent beats are part of what make this a dream pop album instead of an ethereal wave album.

Despite what I might have said about easily preferring this to later Cocteau Twins albums, the band still created a couple more great ones afterwards, even if they lost a bit of what made Head Over Heels more attention-grabbing. I still like ’em for what it’s worth (check my ratings), but I would point anyone interested in dream pop towards Head Over Heels before Treasure or Heaven or Las Vegas, no question. After all, if you’re going to delve into a genre overly-saturated by easy listening amateurish copycat clones, you might as well save yourself some frustration and start with the best to remind yourself that while large and often empty, the dream pop pool is still a pool worth wading through.