1) Slomo; 2) Star Roving; 3) Don't Know Why; 4) Sugar for the Pill; 5) Everyone Knows; 6) No Longer Making Time; 7) Go Get It; 8) Falling Ashes
The comeback album that re-establishes the band by bringing together everything they did before the break.
Key tracks: "Star Roving", "Sugar for the Pill", "No Longer Making Time"
Shoegaze and I have a weird relationship. I love the concept of thick textural walls of sound hiding gorgeous melodies underneath them, atmospheric noise washing over rock rhythms and sheer overbearing volume coating fragile emotions. The amount of shoegaze bands I really listen to? Barely any. I'm stuck with a very romanticised notion of what the genre is in my head, while in the real world I flick through recommended bands and albums in search of something that would resemble the perfect formula I've conjured in my imagination. I am, to put it honestly, a picky eater and I’m struggling to find an entree on the menu that's all to my liking. Slowdive have come closest to a band who frequently offer what I seek, but then what does it say about me that their 2017 self-titled comeback record is my favourite record of theirs (up until this point in time) and at times it only just registers as a shoegaze record?
Before Slowdive entered their extended hiatus in the mid-90s, they had started a move towards a more ambient territory. Slowdive reels things back towards the signature shoegaze sound that Souvlaki established them with, but leaves the marker somewhere partway between both worlds. Shoegaze and dream pop are frequently the best of friends, but with a little nudge on either side and Slowdive could comfortably fall fully one way or the other: one foot in the dynamic explosions of their genre-faithful debut and another in the dreamy soundscapes that followed it, with most songs comfortably displaying aspects of both. If you were a fan before I'd imagine this would sound comfortably like the band you loved no matter which way your preferences leaned; if it took you until this record to really get familiar with the group like what happened with me, it sounds like the perfect marriage between the very first few albums.
The end result of meeting halfway like this is that from a production perspective, Slowdive places just as much importance to the excess of sound as it does to its absence: its songs alternating between areas where that comfortable wave of sound looms over the listener and ones where the empty stretches of space between the different elements are just as important. Its most vital aspect is its spatial nature and how everything hovers within an infinite vacuum, each note and drum hit echoing into the distance, with the vocals faintly floating amidst everything else to offer a faint sense of human warmth in the center of that space. The production job on the record is absolutely spectacular and one of the album's stand-out features, with both depth and clarity that offer space for detail while allowing for
the sound to really envelop your senses when it needs to. It’s an album that sounds massive but because of any epic bombast, but because of how small it makes you feel underneath all that sky.
There's a minimalistic, almost economical way to how Slowdive treat that adopted approach. This is a record where every aspect matters because there's rarely too much else going on, where sparse melodic and productional elements layered on top of steady rhythms that make every note the lead star when they play out. Every single sound is a hook simply by way of existing. It's once again where I need to point out just how spacious this album sounds, because you can practically hear the gaps between the elements that the delayed and echoed sounds then bridge together. It's almost like taking the traditional aspects we associate with shoegaze and playing the game by a new set of rules, which the opener "Slomo" so effectively demonstrates. The colossal hits, the ethereal keyboards and the celestial guitar lines ring out into the void in a way that's perfectly alike the hazy walls of sound of Souvlaki, but played with the bare minimum of layers required while retaining the scope and weight of something traditionally louder.
The band can still operate in a more expected fashion if they want to, and they flash that throughout the album: the gossamer guitar walls of "Everyone Knows", the crashing thunder of "Go Get It" and the swirling rhythms of "Don't Know Why" are rock anthems, or as close as you can get in the context of the rest of the album. Big, guitar-heavy songs where the band's past works rear their head the clearest. Most familiary with "Star Roving", which I have very deliberately isolated from the rest of the pack. If I'm a picky diner who's never satisfied, then "Star Roving" is the perfect dish I've been craving for - it is everything I love about shoegaze from the energy to the etherealness, with the way the it pushes forward almost exuberantly and dresses itself in fuzz and static from head to toes, but with a killer melody as its beating heart underneath it all. It's majestic and while in no way any kind of shining example of originality, it's the model example of how great you can get when you simply execute a formula to perfection.
As wonderful as "Star Roving" is, the album's centrepiece duo of "Sugar for the Pill" and "No Longer Making Time" might just be even better. Alongside "Slomo", it's these two songs that demonstrate just how great you can get when the combo of production, arrangement and songwriting work together perfectly. They're twin songs: both mid-tempo, both carried by a steady bass and beat and both characterised by simple but incredibly effective lead guitar melodies. "Sugar for the Pill" is the gentler of the two, elegantly swaying in a dream state like it's calling back home from another dimension, building its momentum gently as it reaches the album's strongest chorus. There's a very petite melody (guitar? synthesizer?) that pops up for a brief moment after every other line in that chorus that practically steals the show, proving how even the tiniest details can make a grand show on this record - it exists for a literal couple of seconds during the chorus, but it simply sounds so great in the place it inhabits, the sonical cherry on top to crown the song. "No Longer Making Time" on the other hand drowns its yearning into a haunting storm of guitars, flicking from melancholically longing to emotionally ablaze throughout, the album's two dimensions holding hands and taking turns leading the song. It's these two songs that most represent the strengths of the album: the ones that hang onto the listener the strongest afterwards.
The sparse piano lullaby "Falling Ashes" leads the album's brief run of songs into a close by slowly fading into the void that the rest of the album has been circling, and ends it on a note which gives the record a full stop and logical end, but also leaves you wanting more. Adhering to the album's minimal-maximal approach there's only eight songs on the album, but all of them feel essential to its runtime. It does leave you wanting more though, and I guess that applies for the album in general - I gush about it a lot but it's still not quite there among the very greats and the only explanation I can give about it is that it's right on the border but missing that one last step - I'm left wanting a little more, and not only in terms of song numbers. But if bands name their records after themselves whenever they want to re-establish themselves, as is tradition, then the main hope I have is that there's more that builds up on this. Slowdive is a great, gorgeous record - and one of the few that brush against its mother genre I've found and latched onto.
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