Slowdive

There are records that transcend not only their own genre, but the very concept of “rock” or “pop” music, or whatever you want to call it, even while belonging to it through and through: “Just For A Day” by Slowdive is one of them. In 1991, Neil Halstead (vocals and guitar, author of all the songs) and Rachel Goswell (vocals and guitar), leaders and founders of Slowdive just two years earlier, were 21 and 20 years old respectively. Between 1990 and 1991 they released three sensational EPs that had everyone crying miracle, thanks to songs steeped in a dreamy, slowed-down, almost trance-like rock, a sound that perfectly married the enchantment of the Cocteau Twins with the dense guitar interplay of the shoegazers.

The premises for the debut album were already clear: a masterpiece was expected of them, but "Just For A Day" went even beyond the rosiest expectations, revealing itself as an imposing tableau that married the melodic perfection of English pop songcraft with sonorities that had more in common with the paintings of artists like Friedrich and Turner (the latter explicitly cited in the video for the following year's single "Shine") than with their more obvious musical inspirations: dreampop and shoegaze, precisely.

Consider the landscapes painted by those artists: immense, unspoiled panoramas, yet wrapped in a mist of blurred, milky colours that shrouded so much beauty in a boundless melancholy and a bleak unease. Slowdive's music works in the same way: the words whispered by the harmonious voices of Halstead and Goswell, laden with spleen, with a total anguish, with an almost tangible sense of regret and universal perdition, the splendid melodies and dreamlike choruses were the quintessence of the "beauty" that can be found in a song, they were "dreampop" in the sense that this was the pop music one had always dreamed of hearing. Yet all of this was almost nothing compared to the ocean of drones that would rise time and again from the song's soft melodic structure, wrapping everything in a hypnotic vortex that suddenly stripped away any meaning from the very definition of "melody", from the song's development, which, though rigorously anchored to the verse-chorus structure, was in fact almost motionless, contemplative, slowed to the point of stasis.

A sublime example of their aesthetic is the extraordinary "Catch The Breeze", built on an irregular tempo, on chiming guitars and a sad, forlorn melody of immediate emotional impact, with a chorus that comes truly close to Romantic poetry ("and I, I want the world to cry/ and I, I want the sun to shine"), until, as if from nowhere, a "cosmic" wind rises, culminating in an instrumental coda that has nothing musical left about it, but is pure abstraction, pure emotional rapture, with the feedback of the three guitars (the third belonging to Christian Savill) so heavily effected, intertwined and pushed to the extreme that they no longer resemble guitar sound in the slightest, sounding instead more like a symphony of ambient keyboards. The constant chiming of the guitars and the bleak pulse of the bass reveal their musical debt to the free-form exercises and enchanted nursery rhymes of Cocteau Twins, but in Slowdive's hands all this is channelled toward achieving the greatest possible emotional depth, sometimes letting itself be overwhelmed by sadness as in the utterly bleak "Ballad Of Sister Sue", simply one of the most tragic, defeated songs ever heard ("the man said the drink in his hand was all he required/ and it seems much the same when he pointed a gun to his head/ filled it with lead"... "sister, I've lost all the feeling/ I'm lost and I'm sold, I lay down beside you").

Elsewhere, it's the airy beauty of the melody that takes over, a naive and spontaneous beauty, as in that small, fragile marvel "Celia's Dream" ("she flies/ she's gone to ride an angel's breath/ gone to taste a dream"), and in the openly declared homage to their masters Cocteau Twins on "Brighter", which is nonetheless also charged with an underlying, insistent sadness that surfaces in the chorus, mournfully declaimed by Halstead.

The band is equally skilled at avoiding the traps of repetitiveness, and on certain tracks shows ambitions that go well beyond the simple "song". Chief among them is the exceptional, powerful orchestration of "Spanish Air", a long ride close to the most cerebral progressive rock, with its medieval-sounding chorus and a crowded, complex arrangement; and yet everything flows briskly, smoothly, naturally, because all the instruments, as already noted, move forward in unison, locked into one another, and the voices along with them. There's no room in their music for solos, syncopation or virtuosic displays: even in its highest, most ambitious moments, showmanship is something that simply cannot belong to music as spontaneous and "impressionist" as theirs, something their shy, humble shoegaze attitude rejects on principle: proof of this is the ambient experiment of "Erik's Song", which does away with words and rhythm altogether, edging close to the magic of Brian Eno (who, not by chance, was enthralled by the band - "these guys are geniuses", he said at the time - so much so that he offered himself as a collaborator on their second album, "Souvlaki"), but with such restraint, such delicacy, that every single note brings tears of joy.

This is where "Waves" reaches its apotheosis, a solemn hymn to oblivion, a song of death and resignation that, in contrast, is masked by the sunniest, most harmonious arrangement on the whole record: but the lyrics, perhaps the finest of the entire album, speak plainly: "Don't you know I've left and gone away/ you're knocking on the door I closed today/ and everything looks brighter/ the waves they just soothe my pain away". Once again, the record's true throughline returns: this longing to lose oneself in oblivion, to leave behind painful memories because they speak of a happiness irretrievably lost; and so the lyrics and music constantly conjure imaginary landscapes, dreamlike scenery that, more concretely, conceals an endless depression, a deep and total malaise.

What makes Slowdive unique is that all of this emerges not only from the lyrics but above all from the sounds themselves, as proven by the astonishing abstract sketch of "The Sadman", a whispered, spectral melody, recited almost in monosyllables, built on a music made of ticking and scattered pulses that suddenly rise up and merge for a few brief moments into a hurricane of "cosmic" sounds - just enough, though, to submerge, like a stormy sea, the chorus sighed by Goswell, before returning to an apparent calm and letting the chaos erupt once more, even more violently than before. This brings us to the closing track, entrusted to "Primal", a song of devastating beauty that closes the record in a perfect circle, on the same majestic, driving sonorities as the opening track, but here everything is truly immersed in a mystical trance, at least until the chorus finally gives way to an epic crescendo that spills into another hallucinated instrumental coda, the most violent and deafening of all, a desperate cry entrusted once again to sound rather than words, a liberating eruption that gathers and condenses all the emotions that have swung back and forth throughout the record. This is no longer just music: here we are truly standing on one of Friedrich's cliffs, contemplating the sea and the horizon, immersed in an anguished and beautiful solitude, wrapped in spectral mists and blurred, undefined colours ("today I watch the colours fade" is the line that opens "Primal"): in a context like this, made of pure suggestion, it no longer makes sense to talk of influences and musical genres.

With an uncommon gift for melody, Slowdive clearly surpass every other shoegaze band, thanks to their ability to move listeners profoundly with just a few simple words and a sound pushed so far to the extreme that it loses any fixed identity. Few bands have managed to unite form and substance with such perfection and naturalness as Slowdive, nailing - on their very first attempt, no less, and at barely twenty years old - a record as unrepeatable and unforgettable as "Just For A Day".

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09/11/2006