Slowdive

Slowdive. Catch the Breeze

[Sanctuary; 2004]
Rating: 9.5

Gosh does liking music make you feel prematurely old! Last winter, while browsing in a record store, I came across a compilation of shoegazer tracks, sitting there with all the finality of a collection of 60s garage. All of these bands with their echoes and their noise-- even Blind Mr. Jones! A few racks over-- you know, by the deluxe anniversary editions of Pavement records-- I got shaky. Is this what we're doing now: Packing up the 90s for posterity? And why should finality be a grave? Some reappraisal is necessary, and when it comes to those shoegazers, that goes double. As popular as the whole scene was, too many people have spent too many years saying nothing more interesting about these bands than that they weren't quite as good as My Bloody Valentine. And of all the bands that were stuck with that claim, Slowdive is the one for whom it was the most damnably untrue.

These days we all know that, in the end, Slowdive were hardly shoegazers at all. That didn't stop them from recording some of the classics of the genre, but still: There's something in this work-- from the earliest singles to the beyond-rock of their last album-- that's just singularly theirs, something that's made them as influential to today's electronic music artists (or, hell, to goths) as they have been for rock kids. Listening to Catch the Breeze-- which comfortably abridges a three-album career onto two discs-- you get an immediate sense of why. Frontman Neil Halstead's songs have a narcotic languor to them, a quality that makes them sound like he's constantly on the verge of drifting off. But there's something about the deliberate haze of this stuff-- the layers of echoing guitar they wrap songs in, the way the vocals emerge as distant angel moans-- that gives every word and chord a massive intensity. It's like watching film in slow motion: Everything goes watery-dreamy, but it also takes on a weight and a drama that can crush. And through every stage of their career, that's the heart of Slowdive. You're lulled into sleepy waves of melody, the hazy druggy beauty of it all, but just as you're drifting away, the whole thing squalls up into a big crushing storm or drops off into disorienting darkness. People try it with guitars and they try it with computers, and nobody does it quite like this.

So three albums, two discs. The draw for longtime fans is a selection of tracks from the band's earliest singles. This was as close as they came to sounding like a conventional rock band-- albeit a huge, deep, and sleepy one, with Halstead and Rachel Goswell already crooning with lazy grace. By my count there are eight tracks here that aren't available on the band's three albums (assuming you have the expanded U.S. version of Souvlaki), including a Peel Session cover of Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair"-- convenient enough if you don't feel like hunting down 12-inches. The band's first LP, Just for a Day, is underrepresented here, most likely due to its occasionally fluffy, over-prettified production; instead, things leap straight on to the band's two classics, starting with 1993's Souvlaki. Owners of that U.S. edition will find 10 of its tracks included here, and with good reason. This album is, dare I say, every bit as good as Loveless, and just as singular. What's amazing about it is the way Halstead's exquisite pop songwriting comes so strongly to the forefront of the band's sound-- and meshes, magically, with an even greater sonic ambition. The result is the reason critics started calling things "dream-pop," and the best songs here-- "Alison" and "40 Days"-- sound exactly like that: gorgeous traditional pop songs heard in blurry, dreamlike slow motion, sleepy and crushing at the same time. Even more ambitious are the tracks that stemmed from the band's collaboration with Brian Eno-- songs like "Sing" and "Souvlaki Space Station", which wash out into dubby groove and echo, with vocals pushed back into the role of instruments.

Two years later, the band released something else entirely-- a collection of songs recorded mostly by Halstead, with a sound that left the rock-band format behind altogether. The past few years have seen a huge revival of interest in this kind of thing: The "lost generation" of bands-- Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, Seefeel-- for whom Simon Reynolds coined the term "post-rock." It's in those terms that Slowdive's last album, Pygmalion, has come to seem like the best thing Halstead has been involved with. The highlight, "Blue Skied an' Clear", is worth the price of any collection anyone sticks it on: It's one of the most achingly pretty things you'll ever hear, milking incredible pathos from a shuffling drum loop, sparkling touches of guitar, and a chorus of ghostly half-moaning vocals. "Crazy for You" goes even further, constructing another rush of sound and then building it up and breaking it down like dance music. Catch the Breeze nicks a full five songs from Pygmalion, an album only nine tracks long-- and for Americans, it's more than worth it: This LP can be criminally hard to find.

And that's Slowdive, in a handy two-disc set, packed and packaged. There's a scent of finality about it. This, in most cases, will be all the Slowdive anyone needs. There's a quintessential Slowdive-listening experience: You lie in bed letting those waves of sound wash over you; you drift comfortably off into dreamworld, thinking of big pretty oceans; and then you wake up, minutes later, to find a big disorienting blur shooting out of your speakers-- so massive, so intensively vivid, or so dark and ominous, that you wonder how you could sleep to this at all. It's like taking a sleeping pill and waking up to find yourself frighteningly, alarmingly drugged-- an experience I wish, fondly, on everyone who brings this collection home.

-Nitsuh Abebe, December 2nd, 2004

Taken from Pitchfork