Slowdive’s debut, Just For a Day, starts with a driving kick-heavy drum that sounds straight out of a Joy Division song. Pygmalion itself was essentially a forward-thinking 1st wave post-rock or slowcore album, something like Dirty Three or Bark Psychosis but with enough abstraction to make it something truly unique. Months after Creation dropped the band in 1994, following the release of the apparently dissatisfying Pygmalion, Halstead and Goswell reunited with a few others as Mojave 3, a mediocre alt-country band. “Machine Gun” and “Souvlaki Space Station” could easily have come from Chapterhouse or My Bloody Valentine, but Slowdive was never the one-note band those others sometimes seemed to be.
It flaunted wildly flanging (and wildly distorted, and wildly reverberating) guitars, unrelenting but usually simple drums parts, heavy bass, and vocals working as far more than mere delivery mechanisms for lyrics. Souvlaki was certainly a legendary album of the classic shoegaze label Creation Records and the scene that, for a time, celebrated itself. The sound has earned them a reputation among casual fans like myself as the more comprehensible, melodic, English version of the enigmatic, loud, capricious, and Irish My Bloody Valentine. Whatever it is is, for just a moment, that aftermath, echoing before its source reveals itself, is the droning, reverberating, twisted sound of Slowdive. And all of it starting with the aftermath of a strummed guitar.
#Slomo slowdive lyrics full#
After a time only Goswell’s voice remains, in that same steady, unmoving melody, but it moves up an octave shortly, all in her quintessentially breathy voice, until everything fades away and we are left with a softening song that reveals just how full everything had been. Soon the vocals drop out for a stranger, atmospheric sound, come back again, pan from speaker to speaker, never settling, dropping out and coming back, are joined by unidentifiable noises, snippets of feedback, steady snare fills, droning guitars getting louder and louder. “It’s a curious thing.” Rachel Goswell, Slowdive’s second vocalist, has an oblique harmony, mostly on the same note, and higher, as usual, than Halstead’s voice which is, unusually, fairly high to begin with. “Give me your heart,” it sounds like he says. “Slomo,” the opening track of Slowdive’s new self-titled album, the first since 1994’s Pygmalion, is well under way by the time Neil Halstead’s voice – matured and deeper than ever after 23 years – enters with a repeated melody mumbling in an increasingly confused soundscape.
The echoes overlap past the next appearances of the actual figure. A glittering repeating two-note guitar figure enters, with as much reverb and echo as the rest of this introduction has had. The guitar is accompanied soon – a droning tremolo and a solid bass, backed by a light, easy drum beat. The aftermath of a strummed guitar fades in before the strumming is heard at all.
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