Not sure what it is about this album, but Heaven or Las Vegas is my second favorite Cocteau Twins release, after Head Over Heels. One of my favorite aspects of Head Over Heels is the unusual dark, mystical songs. My favorite songs on Treasure carry that tradition. Here we are with the Cocteau Twins’s brightest album yet, and I love it. Only “Road, River and Rail” and “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” could be considered anything dark.

The album art’s colorful waves of red, pink, and purple on top of a soothing blue background says more than you might think, especially when accompanied with song titles such as “Cherry-Coloured Funk” and “Iceblink Luck.” Heaven or Las Vegas is a swirled mix of fruit-flavored liquid sugar, the stuff candy, popsicles, and snow cones are made out of—and it’s just as delicious.

This album’s one problem is the very same problem that’s plagued everything Cocteau Twins has done since Head Over Heels. Indeed, it’s the same thing that’s plagued the vast majority of dream pop albums since the genre’s conception: a lack of variety in the songs. Midtempo songs that simply glide by the entire way through make up the whole album and the same cheery tone accompanies every song with the exception of the darker final two noted in the first paragraph.

Introducing some different instruments or song structures every once in a while would help a lot. As things are now, we just have verse-chorus-verse structures with the chorus being a more pronounced riff in Guthrie’s trademark style. It’s all mellow—too mellow. This would be a much bigger problem if the album were longer than 37 minutes (4 minutes shorter than Treasure, which is a plus) and if the sound they repeated endlessly wasn’t damn good. But it still absolutely does hold this album back, no doubt about that. Also, the way the album abruptly ends in the final track is simply awful. The fade-out lasts for one damn second.

So soft and happy. This album truly has one of the purest, sweetest tones to be found in music.