This Mortal Coil - Box Set

The 2011 This Mortal Coil Deluxe Box Set is a high-end, definitive retrospective of the 4AD collective, limited to just 1,500 copies worldwide and celebrated for its exquisite Japanese craftsmanship. It compiles the group’s three core albums—It’ll End in Tears, Filigree & Shadow, and Blood—alongside a fourth disc, Dust & Guitars, which collects rare singles and previously unreleased tracks. Featuring remastered HDCD audio and "mini-LP" paper sleeve packaging designed by Vaughan Oliver and Ivo Watts-Russell, the set is considered the "holy grail" for collectors. It perfectly encapsulates the ethereal, dream-pop aesthetic of the label through its meticulous attention to both sonic clarity and tactile visual art.

The 2011 This Mortal Coil deluxe box set is more than just a retrospective; it is a definitive monument to the 4AD label’s "golden era." Limited to a global run of 1,500 copies, this collection gathers the three studio albums—It’ll End in Tears, Filigree & Shadow, and Blood—alongside a rarities disc. It serves as a masterclass in how to curate a legacy, transforming Ivo Watts-Russell’s experimental collective from a historical footnote into a tangible piece of art that feels as ethereal and haunting today as it did in the eighties.

Visually, the set is a triumph of tactile design, marking one of the final collaborations between Watts-Russell and the late graphic legend Vaughan Oliver. The packaging employs Japanese "mini-LP" paper gatefold sleeves, manufactured by the renowned Ichikudo company. The attention to detail is staggering, from the precision-printed OBI strips to the high-gloss finishes and reworked photography. Holding these discs feels like handling a gallery catalogue, perfectly mirroring the atmospheric, "dream-pop" aesthetic that the music pioneered.

Sonically, the jump in quality is immediately apparent thanks to the HDCD (High Definition Compatible Digital) mastering. While the original recordings were already celebrated for their cavernous reverb and lush layering, these remasters breathe new life into the arrangements. The acoustic guitars on the Tim Buckley covers sound more intimate, while the synth-heavy soundscapes of the middle period possess a newfound clarity. It is an immersive listening experience that rewards those with high-end audio setups, capturing every breathy vocal and delicate string swell.

The fourth disc, Dust & Guitars, is the crown jewel for long-time devotees. It finally rounds up the project’s elusive singles and includes previously unreleased treasures, most notably a heartbreaking cover of Neil Young’s "We Never Danced." By including these rarities, the box set provides a complete narrative arc of the project, showing how a one-off cover of "Song to the Siren" evolved into a sprawling, multi-instrumental entity that defined an entire subgenre of alternative music.

Ultimately, the 2011 box set remains the "holy grail" for 4AD collectors. It successfully balances the melancholic nostalgia of the past with a level of production quality that meets modern standards. While subsequent reissues in 2018 offered individual high-quality versions, they lack the cohesive, monolithic feel of this specific 2011 treasury. It is a hauntingly beautiful tribute to a project that was never meant to be a traditional band, but rather a fleeting, gorgeous moment in time.

This Mortal Coil - Dust And Guitars

Originally released as the bonus disc for the 2011 self-titled box set, Dust & Guitars serves as a hauntingly beautiful epilogue to the This Mortal Coil legacy, compiling stray singles, rarities, and previously unreleased gems. While it lacks the seamless, atmospheric narrative of the project’s official trilogy, it succeeds as a curated scrapbook of 4AD’s "golden age," featuring standout moments like the jangly 1983 "Sixteen Days / Gathering Dust" medley and a soulful, long-lost cover of Neil Young’s "We Never Danced." Critics generally view the collection as an essential "completist’s convenience" that captures the evolution of Ivo Watts-Russell’s ethereal wave aesthetic, from its post-punk roots to its signature orchestral gloom. Ultimately, it is a fragmented but vital artifact that provides a final, intimate look at the experimental spirit of one of alternative music's most influential collectives.

Dust & Guitars functions less like a traditional studio album and more like a curated scrapbook of the 4AD label’s most haunting experiments. Originally tucked away as the bonus disc in the 2011 box set, it gathers the stray threads of Ivo Watts-Russell’s "dream team" collective—Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Howard Devoto, among others. While it lacks the deliberate, atmospheric flow of the project's official trilogy, it succeeds in documenting the evolution of a sound that defined an entire era of independent music.

The collection’s greatest strength lies in its ability to rescue lost moments from the 4AD vaults. The inclusion of the "Sixteen Days / Gathering Dust" medley from 1983 provides a fascinating look at the project’s post-punk roots, showcasing a jagged energy that would later be smoothed over by the group’s signature ethereal wash. However, the true heart of the disc is the previously unreleased cover of Neil Young’s "We Never Danced," featuring Alison Limerick’s soulful, melancholic delivery. It is a track so polished and poignant that its prior absence from their discography felt like a genuine oversight.

Critically, the album is a bit of a double-edged sword. For the casual listener, the repetition of certain motifs and the inclusion of "single versions" that differ only slightly from their album counterparts might feel redundant. To the "4AD completist," however, these variations are essential artifacts. Critics often point out that while the main albums were grand architectural statements, Dust & Guitars feels more like an intimate look at the blueprints—revealing the trial, error, and raw inspiration that fueled the project's ghostly aesthetic.

Ultimately, Dust & Guitars serves as a fitting, if somewhat fragmented, epilogue to the This Mortal Coil legacy. It doesn't attempt to rewrite the band's history but rather rounds it out with grace. It captures that specific, mid-80s "4AD magic"—where dark folk, ambient textures, and soaring vocals met to create something entirely timeless. It is an essential listen for anyone who wants to hear the final echoes of one of the most influential collectives in alternative music history.

This Mortal Coil - Blood

Released in 1991, Blood serves as the sprawling, 75-minute grand finale to the This Mortal Coil trilogy, trading the jagged post-punk edges of its predecessors for a lush, "chamber pop" aesthetic. Meticulously directed by 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell, the album is a masterclass in atmosphere, seamlessly weaving together haunting instrumentals and ethereal covers of artists like Chris Bell and Syd Barrett. While some critics find its double-album length "taxing" or "bloated," others praise the sophisticated production and standout vocal performances—most notably the folk-inflected harmonies of Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly. Ultimately, it remains a definitive document of the "4AD sound," capturing a transition from darkwave into a polished, cinematic abstraction that feels both timeless and deeply melancholic.

Released in 1991, Blood serves as the sprawling, 75-minute grand finale to Ivo Watts-Russell’s This Mortal Coil project. While its predecessors focused on the skeletal beauty of post-punk and darkwave, Blood leans heavily into a lush, "chamber pop" aesthetic. It is an album of immense patience, trading the occasional jagged edges of the 80s for a seamless, oceanic flow of sound that feels both expensive and hauntingly intimate.

The album is perhaps best known for its incredible vocal performances, particularly the chemistry between Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly on their cover of Chris Bell’s "You and Your Sister." Their harmonies provide a rare moment of grounded, folk-inflected warmth amidst the record's more ghostly, synthesized landscapes. Other standouts, like Caroline Crawley’s take on Syd Barrett’s "Late Night," reinforce the project's knack for uncovering the hidden, melancholic soul within psychedelic and rock classics.

Structurally, Blood is a double-album that demands total immersion. Critics often point out that its length can be "taxing," as it moves through long stretches of instrumental textures and drumless ballads that blur together. However, for those who appreciate the 4AD "ethereal" sound, this lack of friction is the point. It’s an exercise in mood-setting, where the transitions between tracks are as vital as the songs themselves, creating a singular, twilight-lit world that never breaks character.

Ultimately, Blood is a meticulously crafted farewell that successfully unified diverse genres—from country-rock to avant-garde minimalism—under a gothic umbrella. It lacks the shock of the new that made It’ll End in Tears a classic, but it compensates with a sophisticated production polish that has aged remarkably well. It remains a definitive document of the "4AD Sound," capturing a specific moment where indie rock surrendered entirely to beautiful, dark abstraction.

This Mortal Coil - Filigree & Shadow

Released two years after their debut album, This Mortal Coil’s Filigree & Shadow was no less ornate than its predecessor; a double album with each of its four sides a self-contained unit. New faces joined the cast for this record, including a variety of singers Ivo handpicked like Alison Limerick, Jeanette, Dominic Appleton (Breathless), sisters Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski (Sunset Gun), and Richenel. This Mortal Coil's second album is arguably their best, a sprawling double-LP expanding on the gothic intrigue of It'll End In Tears with even more widescreen production and symphonic grandeur; vocals are handled largely by Breathe's Dominic Appleton and the wonderful Rutkowski Sisters. This is tender, emotional music - sometimes cloyingly so - but by god, is it good, and unlike pretty much anything else out there these days. As before, and after, 4AD and TMC mastermind Ivo Watts-Russell delves into the songbook of West Cost American folk-rock - which, lest we forget, wasn't as well-documented and canonised in '86 as it is now - and comes up with gold. A sepulchral version of Tom Rapp's 'The Jeweller' opens the album, Appleton turns Gene Clark's cocaine-strained love song 'Strength Of Strings' into a fire and brimstone epic, and Deirdre Rutkowski gives one of the finest vocal performances of the 1980s or any other decade for a soaring dub-pop take on Gary Ogan's 'I Want To Live'. Tim Buckley ('Morning Glory'), Judy Collins, Colin Newman, Talking Heads ('Drugs') and Van Morrison ('Come Here My Love') are also covered, but remarkably one of the album's most classic-sounding and resonant songs, 'Tarantula', was originally by 4AD's own Colour Box, whose own Martyn Young fronts a transformative, celestial chamber-pop arrangement by Watts-Russell. And of course there's no shortage incredible instrumentals like 'Ivy and Neet', featuring the unmistakably laconic saxophone of Dif Juz's Richard Thomas, the title track, and the incredibly grave 'The Horizon Bleeds & Sucks It Thumb'. The influence of this album, at once mournful and ecstatic, can be heard in everything from Massive Attack through to The xx and even the likes of The Haxan Cloak and Raime - and though not without its cloying moments, it remains an out and out classic, bound together by John Fryar's engineering and Watts-Russell's visionary gusto.

This Mortal Coil - It'll End In Tears

The first of 4AD owner Ivo Watts-Russell's multi-artist studio sessions under the This Mortal Coil name, 1984's It'll End in Tears was a surprisingly influential album in many circles, key in the reawakening of interest in artists like Alex Chilton and the late Tim Buckley by a younger generation of listeners. (Two songs from Big Star's Third are included, a version of "Kangaroo" featuring Cindytalk vocalist Gordon Sharp that sounds even druggier and more disorienting than the original, and a chilling piano and strings version of "Holocaust" with haunted vocals by Howard Devoto; the simple but ravishing version of Buckley's "Song to the Siren" by Cocteau Twins Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie was cited by David Lynch as the direct inspiration for Julee Cruise's first two albums and has since been used several times in commercials and films.) The covers are the most memorable part of the album; a Robbie Grey-sung version of Colin Newman's "Not Me," cleverly incorporating a hypnotic riff from another Newman song, "B," is the most conventionally hooky song on the album, to the point that folks who haven't listened to the album for a while tend to forget that half of the songs are "band" originals. These six songs mark 4AD's definitive break from its origins as an artsy post-punk imprint (Bauhaus, Modern English's first few records, etc.) to the development of "the 4AD sound," a heavily reverbed wash of treated guitars and atmospheric keyboards with vocals treated as another instrument in an amorphous wash of sound. The problem is that these largely instrumental tracks sound more like half-baked studio doodles than fully formed songs; a three-song stretch on side two featuring Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard is particularly tiresome. As a whole, It'll End in Tears is a lovely, often exquisite record; taken individually, the power of some of the songs is lost.

This Mortal Coil - Sixteen Days Gathering Dust 12''

Sixteen Days / Gathering Dust is a bouncy ethereal Goth pop track that fully displays Ivo’s love of the Goth rock scene with comparisons to Bauhaus, The Cure and early Siouxie & The Banshees apparent. The length of the track at over 9 minutes was quite rare for a pop oriented style of music but somehow keeps the groove generating with the jangle guitars, new wave drum machine and silky Gothic female vocals. The second track “Song To The Siren” a cover of singer Tim Buckley’s 1970 folk song is beautifully performed by Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. The closer “Sixteen Days Reprise” is exactly as you’d expect it only more in The Cure sort of Goth pop delivery. In fact I’d say it sounds more like late 80s Cure than the Cure sounded themselves at the time. It has more changes and sound effects.
While only a three song 12” EP, this debut is quite the fun listen. Each track is quite distinct, well-crafted and stands apart from the more commercial sounding bands of the era. While not quite as raw as Bauhaus and not as ethereal and dream poppy as the Cocteau Twins, it manages to find that middle ground with just enough rock gusto mixed and mingled with the suave Gothic rock approach. Personally I find this to be a great starting point to explore one of the coolest Goth spinoffs in This Mortal Coil that have since been pegged as ethereal wave(?)

This Mortal Coil - Late Night

Between 1984 and 1991 This Mortal Coil released three moody masterpieces, It’ll End In Tears (1984), Filigree And Shadow (1986) and Blood (1991). The brainchild of 4AD ‘s co-founder and tastemaker Ivo Watts-Russell, the plan seems to have been to take lost classics from the sixties and seventies and reinterpret them within the circle of his arty contemporary musical friends, mainly on the 4AD label, Watts-Russell acting as musical director. The releases kept the 4AD tradition of ‘album cover as art’ care of Vaughn Oliver from design gurus 23 Envelope. Here we have Caroline Crawley from Bournemouth’s Shelleyan Orphan singing Syd Barrett’s Late Night from Barrett’s 1970 album, The Madcap Laughs. The experiment was mostly successful; the songs became atmospheres of melancholy and sadness.