Artist: Slowdive
Album: Everything Is Alive
Year: 2023
Grade: B+
In Brief: I went from never having heard of Slowdive to falling in love with the sound of their latest record in almost no time. Even knowing that they were one of a few pioneers of the shoegaze/dream pop sound back in the 90s and that they had a pretty successful revival going on in more recent years, I was still intimidated by how their music was described to me. Turns out I had nothing to fear – it’s just the right blend of diffuse, hazy, nostalgic abstraction and pop-adjacent electronic wizardry. The result is a record that, while I’m not sure I could ever fully understand it, is an absolute delight to listen to over and over again.
It seems downright criminal that New Year’s Day, 2024, marked my first experience with a Slowdive record. They just seem like the sort of band I should have stumbled across a while ago. If nothing else, when I binged my way through the 90s back in 2021 and made a point of trying to expand my horizons by giving legendary bands like My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins a chance, Slowdive probably should have been on the menu then, too. As a band that apparently drew frequent comparisons to MBV back in the day but who might have actually veered closer to the Cocteaus in terms of their sound, it seems in retrospect like they got brought up a lot in discussions of the nebulously intertwined shoegaze and dream pop genres, but sort of played second fiddle to both of them, being poorly advertised by their record label and even becoming the butt of jokes from critics who thought those other bands were superior. Putting out three records in the first half of the 90s and then calling it quits in 1995, it seems like they attained cult status at some point in the years since, taking the better part of twenty years to finally reform and start working on new music, somewhat resembling the situation with MBV between Loveless and their 2013 self-titled album. They also have two members at their core – vocalists and multi-instrumentalists Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell – who were once a couple, which gives them something else in common with Cocteau Twins, except that their breakup didn’t result in the dissolution of the band (it actually may have improved their working relationship). Unlike a lot of bands who reform after such a long time away, it seems like their second act is actually going better for them than their first, in terms of critical acclaim and also in terms of their freedom to experiment with their sound as they see fit. Numerous music writers and vloggers got me to give their most recent album, 2023’s Everything Is Alive, a chance by putting it on their year-end lists, but I didn’t go into it expecting to be blown away. This band has “slow” in its name, for crying out loud, and they’re operating in a genre where minimalism, repetitive build-up, and the de-prioritization of lyrics (or at least, understandable and coherent ones) can easily torpedo my enjoyment of a group of musicians who might otherwise make beautiful sounds together. I truly had no idea what I was in for, though, because I fell in love with this thing alarmingly quickly.
While it’s clear from reading up on the band’s history that they were never opposed to exploring the prettier side of the shoegaze/dream pop landscape, it seems apparent that they started experimenting more with synthesizers and melodic guitar arpeggios on this album. Some of their choruses (or verses, on the songs that have instrumental breaks instead of clear “choruses”), inscrutable though they may be, are so darn catchy that I kind of feel bad for assuming going in that they’d be the kind of band to deny me such simple pleasures. Clearly I’d never confuse Slowdive for a “pop” band, but they gave themselves permission to not be afraid of sounding “poppy” on several of these songs, and it works wonders for the overall pacing of an album that also has a fair amount of devastatingly lovely slower and sparser material. (I would say it’s a classic case of “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, but the cover art wasn’t the problem by any means – it’s got a freaking labyrinth on it, how could I not love that?) Even the short track listing – only 8 songs, but at just over 40 minutes, they average out to a length of around 5 minutes each, with the longest still quite reasonably clocking in at close to 7 – led to some unfair expectations that were quickly disarmed once I threw some headphones on and allowed myself to be still and just soak it all in. Each of these tracks has a very distinctive mood to it – sometimes it’s upbeat and euphoric, sometimes its slow, pensive, and even a bit sad, but it’s pretty much always captivating. That much was clear to me before I even bothered to try dissecting any of their lyrics – which, like a lot of bands in this genre, are kind of a secondary concern, and are generally rather abstract or (in one case) undecipherable. I don’t pretend for a second that I understand Slowdive – but just like with the Cocteau Twins, a band that I had a surprising success rate with as I went through their classic material from the 80s and 90s, Slowdive pretty much had me at “hello” with this record. They’ve definitely making me regret not checking it out in time to add it to my own list of favorites from 2023. But I can absolutely say that they’ve significantly brightened the beginning of 2024 for me – no easy task considering what a stressful few months it’s been. Everything Is Alive is exactly the kind of album that I’d want to put on, take a deep breath, and indulge in a temporary escape from the world around me when circumstances get difficult.
INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:
1. Shanty
I feel instantly transported to a futuristic landscape as soon as the gurgling synths of the opening track fade in. It’s a pretty good barometer for what we’ll hear on this album overall, and I’m particularly intrigued by the two markedly different synth tones in competing rhythms – first there’s a buzzy, metallic sort of sound providing the song’s main melodic hook in triplets, while a cleaner sound, almost resembling a harpsichord, plays a countermelody in 4/4. The drums, vocals and other instruments are in 4.4, except for possibly the guitar, which is rather noisy when it suddenly bursts in, and which just sort of does its own free-form ambient thing untethered to any particular rhythm for the rest of the track. By the time Neil’s hushed vocals come in, they’re almost relegated to the background and they only really comprise two short verses in an otherwise long and engrossing song. But it’s an aesthetic that I’ve become surprisingly fond of in recent years, and the impressionistic lyrics add to the overall feeling that he’s singing from the point of view of some sort of a drifter, maybe a land sailor roaming the landscape on some sort of hovercraft, collecting whatever junk he can sell to make ends meet, all the while dreaming of a far-off lover he hopes to one day be reunited with. It’s eerily dystopian and yet fleetingly romantic all at once, and it sets the stage beautifully for the exquisite collages of sound that will follow it.
Grade: A-
2. Prayer Remembered
This slow, reflective instrumental piece almost feels like the sort of thing you’d put somewhere later in an album, to serve as a sort of intermission. It was weird to me at first to have the only song without (discernible) lyrics show up at track 2. But that didn’t stop me from being pulled in effortlessly by its delicate and yet somehow also rhythm section-heavy meditation that goes through a familiar enough sequence of chords a few times over that I guess you could consider them a “verse” and “chorus”. There’s lots of guitar tremolo and synthetic ambiance hanging out in the background, but for a wordless experiment, it’s surprisingly grounded, and it yanks at my heartstrings in a way that’s hard to explain. Neil had originally written this as a reflection on the birth of his son, and didn’t bring it to the rest of the band until fairly late in the game – at that point it was actually more synth-heavy, but he liked what the other members were doing so much that he actually went with a “less is more” approach and took his synth part out. The looming bass notes that slide from one chord up or down to the next are strongly reminiscent of some of the more peaceful and yet eerie passages from Sigur Rós‘s earlier works – and they in turn were likely influenced by the post-rock and shoegaze scene of the 90s, so it’s funny how it all comes full circle.
Grade: B
3. Alife
And now for one of the big pop songs! Sort of. It’s definitely got one of the catchiest choruses on the album, with very clean, well-defined melodic arpeggios from the guitars and keyboards, accompanying a breathy chorus from Rachel Goswell that makes my heart soar whenever I listen to it. If “Shanty” hovered over the futuristic landscape, then this track traverses it at high speed, turning everything around you into a beautiful rainbow blur. It’s the kind of song I can imagine listening to with the top down as you fly down a beachside highway on a sunny day (not that I’m a person who drives fancy cars or who likes the interference of outside noise in my automotive listening experience, but just go with me on the visual here). And the relentlessly uplifting feeling that I get from it makes it all the more tragic when I realize that the repeated lyrics in this chorus is (allegedly) saying “Two lives are hard lives with you”. Genius could be leading me astray on this one, for all I know – the folly of some of its users to document the abstract vocalizations of certain bands in this genre can be amusing sometimes. But it sounds pretty close to that, at the very least. Neil’s cleaner, mellower vocals in the verse section may seem like he’s just keeping the band in a holding pattern until they can return to that euphoric chorus, but they give us a glimpse of what might have gone wrong: “Hey, just look at us now/Time made fools of us all/We look, but we don’t understand/We try, but we don’t look around,” This suggests that the song is a remembrance of something beautiful that can’t be returned to or reconstructed – a dream that was once achieved, but that is now lost to the mists of time. It’s gorgeous and tragic and somehow everything I could want from a song in this genre all at once.
Grade: A+
4. Andalucia Plays
Another slow, somber piece is up next, and it feels a bit dirgelike at first, especially with it being nearly seven minutes in length. But once again, the band’s masterful use of subtle textures and effects keeps it from feeling too dreary, or like it drags on for longer than it needs to. Neil’s voice almost sounds like a cross between a whisper and a yawn as he sings with hushed reservation in his voice, almost as though he didn’t want to wake the sleeping dog that is just one of the many interesting details mentioned in a memory of a dark winter that he’s conjuring up. This seems like it was an important time spent between him and someone he was close to – one that might have been sad and tragic, but that also bonded them together in some way. I find it intriguing that the phrase “And you are the heart, the prayer I remember” shows up here, subtly referencing the title of the album’s second track, and then later the phrase “Chained to the clouds” is uttered, a call-forward to track seven. This track gets its own title from “Andalucia”, a John Cale song from the 70s, that apparently served as the soundtrack to this memorable time, and that now brings it to mind whenever the song is played again. I love how what could have been very basic and boring – a drum beat so slow and meticulous that it’s almost tiptoeing its way through the song, an acoustic guitar strum that ruminates on a fairly simple chord sequence over and over – gets elevated to levels of heartbreaking beauty due to how carefully and yet generously the groups drizzles all of their guitar and keyboard effects on top of it. Take the simpler elements away, and it would all be one diffuse, fluffy cloud of sound, with nothing to ground it; take all of the fancy layering away and you’ve got the reason why a lot of slow-burning post-rock bands don’t really do it for me. All of it needs to exist at once to bring the gloomy grays and glistening whites of that winter scene to life.
Grade: B+
5. Kisses
The album’s lead single – another, breezy up-tempo gem that Neil had to self-consciously admit was more “pop” than the band’s usual, very clearly brings to mind New Order, which is never a bad thing as far as I’m concerned. Those smooth, fluid guitar and bass lines running through it are unmistakable, though you still get the dreamy keyboard ambiance and the two male and female vocalists sort of melting into each other, which sets Slowdive apart a little bit from their most obvious influence here. It’s pretty obvious from the title that the mood here is more of a romantic one, though with the impressionistic lyrical style, it’s anyone’s guess what the phrase “born desert sun”, which follows the title in the chorus each time, is supposed to mean. The lyrics vaguely suggest an invitation to move away from a painful place and experience something new, but that’s a very broad interpretation of what was probably meant more as a series of scattered evocative phrases than a continuous narrative. Knowing that this was an album born out of a period of grief and struggle for the band (both Neil and Rachel lost a parent, and of course Covid-19 stymied their recording plans for a while there too), it’s actually quite a surprise that they came up with a song as refreshingly un-gloomy as this one. Neil was unsure about putting the word “kisses” so clearly upfront in its refrain, ultimately deciding to leave it there because nothing else quite had the same effect. The funny thing is that the drums, which have a slight electronic dampening effect on them, along with the melody and overall feel of this track, are weirdly reminiscent of a decade-old song called “Tereza” by the band Trails and Ways, who were probably too obscure for Slowdive to have even been aware of, but who were probably influenced by the late 20th century dream pop scene now that I look back. So basically this track has me nostalgic for the 80s, 90s, and a band that was briefly one of my favorites in the mid-2010s all in one fell swoop.
Grade: A
6. Skin in the Game
This one starts off as more of a chill, mid-tempo track with a programmed drum loop, but one thing I’ve come to appreciate the more I listen to this album is how Simon Scott‘s live drumming can sneak up on the listener, augmenting the otherwise bare bones that a simple loop would otherwise provide. Lo-fi meets hi-fi on this track that has some bits leftover from one of Neil’s four-track demos – the mix is slight muddy without being abrasive, and his low-key vocals seem like they’re coming in from different sources at different points, suggesting that he might’ve strung together different vocal takes, possibly even from different songs that were later spliced together. Just looking at the structure, melody, and overall instrumentation, you might not pick up on anything all that unusual happening in the recording process – you’ve got the band’s usual keyboard and guitar ambiance to serve as the smooth, icy portion of your ice cream sundae, and the subtlest of backing vocals meshed together with Neil’s rather sleepy-sounding lead as the marshmallow topping, but then there’s a bit of acoustic guitar there for a little crunch and sharpness, like someone sprinkled in a little granola or something. As with tracks two and four, I might not find it as immediate as the album’s more up-tempo material, but I’m warming up to the “slow” side of Slowdive just fine. The notion of having “skin in the game”, meaning that you’re invested in something to the point where it will genuinely hurt if you lose it, seems almost antithetical to the relaxed delivery, but it’s an irony that I appreciate nonetheless. It’s almost like a realization that you’ve reached such a place of peace and fulfillment in your life that you never want to leave this moment of zen, but even in the midst of that bliss, you realize how fragile it all is and how one circumstance gone awry could bring it all toppling down.
Grade: B
7. Chained to a Cloud
Here’s the track whose title was foreshadowed in “Andalucia Plays” – ironically enough, the words don’t actually occur anywhere in this song, which is actually a lot like “Shanty” in terms of how it’s anchored by a lovely synth arpeggio, and it’s really just a couple verses separated by dreamy instrumental breaks. This one stretches the formula almost to its breaking point, taking a while for the vocals to come in, and also bringing in the drums a bit later than you would expect, allowing them to cool off a bit and then come back again just to give the song a bit of variety. Overall, I find this one quite lovely, and I appreciate how Rachel and Neil are trading the lead vocal back and forth (insofar as you could call what sounds like echoing words reverberating from far down a hallway a “lead”, anyway), and how the soft but trembling guitars contribute layers of ambiance that I’d describe less as a “wall” of sound and more as a “bed”. Even though this song doesn’t attempt to explain its own title, the whole idea of something as nonsensical as being chained to a cloud pretty well sums up how I feel about this entire album – it’s misty, a bit chilly, and hard to see through, and you wander into it expecting it to not have much substance – so how is it that I feel so strongly tethered to this thing, like it won’t let me go? The drumming on this one – which sticks to 4/4 but parcels it out in an interesting, syncopated pattern – reminds me of a more chilled-out version of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” by Radiohead, just with a synth melody subbed in for the chiming guitars of that song, and a far less sinister atmosphere overall. I find myself wishing it would do something a little more climactic in its final minutes – this is the longest track on the album, after all – but if we’re this deep into the album and this is the first time it’s registered that maybe things are getting a tad repetitive, then I’d say Slowdive has been doing an excellent job with all the smoke and mirrors that have kept me from making that complaint thus far.
Grade: B+
8. The Slab
Given the mellower feel of the last two tracks (with a hint of a climax as “Cloud” faded out), I would have expected a very sparse and somber conclusion to the album. Slowdive surprised me here by doing the exact opposite and ending with the most aggressive track in the sequence – a move not unlike their peers in My Bloody Valentine. The big, booming drum loop absolutely defines this song, and the title was quite deliberate – Neil wanted it to feel like an impenetrable “slab” of sound, and I’d say the band succeeded. It accomplishes this without being overly abrasive – there’s a delay effect on the chiming guitars, some reverb on the drums, and the impression that the vocals are trapped behind these denser elements – whoever created the Genius page for this track just gave up and wrote “Non-Lyrical Vocals”, which kind of makes me laugh because I can make out actual words here and there (most notably “everything is everything” in the final fade-out), but there’s a part of me that feels like not knowing what’s being said greatly increases the mystique of the song. I love how the same basic melody on the guitar morphs to accommodate the shifting chord sequence – it’s a great hook that will echo on and on in the listener’s head long after the track has faded out. Am I a bit disappointed that we’re at track eight and the album is already ending? Sure – I think one or two more tracks of this caliber could have put Everything Is Alive over the top and earned it a coveted “A” rating from me. But leaving me wanting more sure has worked in this album’s favor in terms of how many repeat spins I give it, knowing full well that when “The Slab” fades out I’m going to want to start up “Shanty” again before too much time has passed. That’s about as close as I ever get to putting an album on repeat, and it takes a genuinely talented band to make music that is this vague and impressionistic stick with me enough to want to do that.
Grade: A-
WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Shanty $1.50
Prayer Remembered $1
Alife $2
Andalucia Plays $1.25
Kisses $1.75
Skin in the Game $1
Chained to a Cloud $1.25
The Slab $1.50
TOTAL: $11.25
BAND MEMBERS:
Neil Halstead: Vocals, guitars, keyboards
Rachel Goswell: Vocals, guitars, keyboards, tambourine
Nick Chaplin: Bass
Christian Savill: Guitars
Simon Scott: Drums, guitars, electronics
LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:
MORE USEFUL LINKS:
http://www.slowdiveofficial.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Slowdive
murlough23 
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