People need labels. They also like reflexive
pejoratives for confining art within a limited but easily referenced realm without
having to really experience it. According to some Slowdive were once the
Cocteau Twins, then they were shoegaze and now they are heritage act. Slowdive
were never (obviously) the Cocteau Twins. Shoegazing (or a lack of onstage
performance) was also a deliberate means to differentiate a band from the
flailing baby boomers, hair metal nonsense and disingenuous pop histrionics of
the early 90s. (The monstrous was in the demonstrative.) Not to mention, ahem, a way of functioning guitar-effect pedals,
which happened to be near the odd desert boot or winkle picker (the original
shoegazer’s shoe of choice). Thankfully, though, Slowdive transcend the collective
sneers chosen to imprison them, and as this new album demonstrates, the band is
also so much more than just a heritage act.
Slowdive the album, titled after the band as a
contemporizing statement, is not an inherited tradition of providing slithers
of sustenance to the sentimentality of middle age nor is it an exercise of
warming up leftovers to feed a propensity for nostalgia. Slowdive the album is
alive. It is a record that burns with the infectious joy of creativity. The joy
of knowing your strengths and being able to build on the past while also,
importantly, being able to look to the future and still create something beyond
a scope previously imagined, like a form of magic.
Oh, and what a beautiful sound Slowdive still
make. The soaring guitars in many of the songs have such an emotive force. No other
band can make their effects-pedal-trickery sound like the opening of the
heavens and at the same time allow for an exhilarating projection into oneself
with the bittersweet thrill of being alive. It’s a glorious soundtrack to the
battles to feel and be felt, within and without, before many of us depart to
our imagined but majestic Valhalla.
Slowdive is also an album that transcends
beyond its instrumentation. Songs marry words to these beautiful sounds to open up interior
rooms for contemplation, whether it is (as Rachel and Neil sing) a room for thinking
about love, no longer making time; sugaring the pill or just wanting to feel it.
There are only eight tracks on this album and the economy of the riches,
condensed and concise, only leaves you wanting more. Which is at is should be
for a band who magically exist beyond their heritage and whatever lifeless word
prisons made for them. Slowdive (the
album) proves it.
Slowdive (the album) is
available on May 5th from Dead Oceans.
Christian Martius (2017)
