We don’t have enough remastered box sets of albums we loved in our youth. We’re not being sarcastic, we really don’t. Keep ‘em coming, impoverished record labels; we can always buy more shelves. The latest soundtrack to our mooching years, to be dusted off and polished up are the three albums released by the group that wasn’t really a group: This Mortal Coil. And yes, there’s a bonus disc. 

For the unenlightened, This Mortal Coil was the pet project of Ivo Watts Russell, head of 4AD – a record label with such a strong and aesthetically driven identity it attracted a fanbase as if it were a band in its own right. In 1983, Ivo assembled many of the musicians signed to the label to record a medley of songs by the band Modern English, backed by the now immortal cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren, performed by Elisabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins. And so the label became a band.

The three original albums presented here feature some of the most imaginative, genre-blurring and beautiful music of the 1980s and early 90s.

1984’s It’ll End In Tears is the classic: cold wave electronica elevated by the label’s greatest voices – Liz Fraser and Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard. Having already recorded the definitive Song to the Siren, they repeated the trick with Roy Harper’s Another Day. The album also led many a trench coated moodychops to the music of Big Star, thanks to two covers from their Third/Sister Lovers album.

Filigree & Shadow, from 1986, is less immediate. Spread across a double album, and missing its predecessor’s star vocalists, the songs on Filigree… appear to disintegrate and reform at a dreamlike pace. The highlights are Dominic Appleton’s achingly sung The Jeweler (originally by US psych folk band Pearls Before Swine), Alison Limerick’s stark and soulful treatment of Talking Heads’ Drugs, and the arrival of Deidre & Louise Rutowski, whose hauntingly odd harmonies would define the TMC sound. 

After a five year gap, Blood was an almost strictly song-based affair. A gorgeous record centered on the swooping and catching tones of Shelleyan Orphan’s Caroline Crawley – one of the finest voices of her generation. Her take on The Apartments’ Mr. Somewhere sets the bar almost too high for the rest of the album to follow. But it’s matched by a heartbreakingly underplayed You and Your Sister (by Big Star’s Chris Bell) sung as a duet between Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly, in the dying throes of the original Breeders lineup. Not to be outdone, Alison Limerick delivers Spirit’s Nature’s Way as if it’s her swan song.

Dust & Guitars, the bonus disc - new to this release, collects all of This Mortal Coil’s singles and b-sides in chronological order, adding an unreleased version of Thaïs (Bird Of Paradise) and a cover of Neil Young’s We Never Danced, an outtake from Blood.

We owe a debt to these albums. They were an education to the young us. Stuck in a village where no one seemed to own a record collection that didn’t have Shakin Stevens in it, This Mortal Coil broadened our musical horizons. That we’re still hearing new elements in recordings we’ve listened to though three decades makes this collection priceless. Which is a good job since the box set is bloody expensive.*

This Mortal Coil Boxset is out now