Four-Calendar Café (Remastered 2024)

After years of abstraction, there’s a newfound clarity in 1993’s Four-Calendar Café. On “Bluebeard,” Robin Guthrie’s steel guitar lends a hint of country music—an unusually earthy reference for such an otherworldly duo—and Elizabeth Fraser’s shape-shifting vocals are singularly intelligible; “Evangeline,”with its plain-spoken admissions (“I am not the same/I’m growing up again”), marks an unexpected shift from childlike wonder to clear-eyed adulthood. But their atmospheres are as seductively gorgeous as ever—particularly on “My Truth,” which shimmers like a curtain of icicles.