O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Cocteau Twins: Stagnant Waters Ruin Flow

The best way to approach the Cocteau Twins is to take John Lennon’s advice: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”

Actually, with its gauze-like textures and its absence of lyrical signposts, the Scottish-British band doesn’t really leave a listener much choice: The Cocteaus’ frequently gorgeous mood music exists primarily to sweep listeners off into their own reveries.

If you don’t conjure your own meanings and images for the music, singer Elizabeth Fraser’s private language of ethereal trills and sighs and husky, alarmed calls isn’t about to supply them for you. Much of the time, Fraser sounds like an infant amusing itself with the discovery of its own capacity for making sound--and finding that those sounds express its momentary pleasures and hurts.

Song titles like “A Kissed Out Red Floatboat” and “Ella Megalast Burls Forever”--two of the 19 numbers the Cocteaus played Monday night at UC Irvine’s Crawford Hall--seem like the band’s wry commentaries on the futility of trying to make any narrative sense of its music.

Bird-like in appearance as well as in her aptitude for weaving lovely, unfathomable vocal patterns, the tiny, demure Fraser was pretty much the show. At peak moments, it was easy to ride her swooping, fluttering, caressing voice into a reverie:

Fraser coos airily in that pure soprano of hers. You are a baby again, nestled in your mother’s arms.

Fraser arcs her voice into pure, lofty regions, riding upward from the hazy current of guitars and bass surrounding her. You are in a subterranean grotto, with light from some unseen source streaming into the watery chamber in a vision of luminous beauty.

But the spot-lit Fraser wasn’t the only person on stage. Four men thrummed away in the dark behind her, with only slight variation from song to song. The reveries they induced were not quite so poetic:

You are at a Genesis concert, circa 1976 ... a particularly dull Genesis concert in which Phil Collins and the boys have gotten stuck playing a single broad, slowly oozing passage.

At least, that’s how it seemed sometimes during the Cocteaus’ 80-minute program. The band’s use of what seemed to be a junior-grade version of the arena light show that Genesis (and Pink Floyd too) trucked around on its last tour further added to the feeling that the Cocteau Twins are progressive-rock revivalists clothed in post-punk pedigrees.

It was the sort of lighting, with gracefully moving beams and splashy colored backdrops, that bands use when the humans involved don’t plan to generate much visual interest.

The Cocteaus’ reserve would have been no problem had the band created more musical motion.

On the Twins’ records--including the winning, surprisingly pop-oriented current album, “Heaven or Las Vegas”--Fraser gets to challenge herself by double- and triple-tracking her voice to create harmony and counterpoint. Live, she was flying alone.

Neither her full-time band mates, guitarist Robin Guthrie or bassist Simon Raymonde, nor the two adjunct guitarists added to flesh out the Cocteaus’ stage lineup, surfaced from a fuzzy haze of electronic effects to take a dynamic turn in the clear space alongside their impressive singer.

One waited in vain for a guitar line to dance with that voice, and perhaps prod it toward something even more spontaneous and unexpected.

The use of canned drum and synthesizer rhythms further caged the Cocteaus. A live drummer well might stir the entire band to freer motion and interaction, something the show badly needed (rapt and appreciative as the Cocteaus’ full house was, the fans barely moved during the concert). After all, it’s hard to float downstream when the current has gone stagnant.

The opening band, Galaxie 500, also is big on reverie, but the mood and place weren’t conducive to its somnolent spell. The melancholy Boston trio’s slow-moving two-chord drones and sighed melodies would be just right for an intimate club in the tired, waning hours of the night. But, while the band got a respectful and receptive hearing from the Cocteaus’ audience, the 2,000-capacity Crawford Hall wasn’t the right place for Galaxie 500, and 8 p.m. wasn’t the right time (the concert originally had been booked into the even bigger Bren Events Center before being moved to more intimate quarters after ticket sales apparently failed to warrant the larger setting).

That’s not to say that Galaxie 500 need be consigned forever to playing small places in the wee, sad hours. But it could take a tip from the Feelies, a kindred Velvet Underground- and Neil Young-influenced guitar band, by honing its musicianship and expanding its dynamics so that what begins in somnolence can build to an exhilarating release.