Why Slowdive is Great

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally remembered to make my post on Slowdive and why I think they're special.  Recently it's seemed to me that I could make an entire "in defense of..." series - I've already done a post on the very polarizing Oasis, suggesting that their persona is more or less to blame for the revulsion that they seem to inspire - you can't argue with the quality of their first two albums, but when a band that seems to take music very seriously can't live up to their own lofty standards, it can be tough.

Slowdive is not like Oasis in this sense.  In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who has spent time listening to Slowdive that doesn't like them.  At the same time, however, it can't really be denied that Slowdive has been sort of passed over in the 'history books' (if such a thing existed) of indie rock, as the shoegaze genre's crown has been unanimously granted instead to the venerable My Bloody Valentine.

Now, to be sure, MBV is more than deserving of the praise they've received.  Loveless is an indisputable masterpiece, and Isn't Anything basically invented the shoegaze subgenre.  At the same time, I would suggest that they weren't the ones who perfected the aesthetic, and that this duty instead fell to Slowdive with their masterwork Souvlaki.

On the surface, there isn't much to set it apart.  While even the name Loveless evokes the universal drama and bittersweet nature that the crafted sound fulfills, and the music is very clearly something unprecedented - there still has never been written anything that sounds like "Only Shallow" or "Blown a Wish" - Souvlaki, a name taken from a dirty joke, seems a bit mundane in comparison, and at first listen the music is perhaps not much different from the airy sound of so many bands from the late '80's and early '90's.  While Souvlaki lacks the bite of Loveless that gives "Only Shallow" so much energy and "Sometimes" so much brooding tension, it makes up for it in an unmatched sweeping grandeur.

Album opener "Alison" is a dark and guilty swirling haze of sound that puts more weight in lyrical composition than any of My Bloody Valentine's work does (granted that lyrics are perhaps more important to me than to others), while the second track "Machine Gun" takes the ethereal aesthetic present in MBV's "Blown a Wish" and "Come in Alone" but turns it from an effervescent lightness into a dark and heavy intangibility in the sirenic minor keys of Rachel Goswell only interrupted by plaintive chorus sung by Neil Halstead.  "40 Days" is equally powerful, building a slightly poppier melody on top of a more structured instrumental rhythm to express a sense of longing with less gravity to it.  Far from being a weakness, "40 Days" is instead a masterpiece of bittersweet dream pop, similar in sentiment to Ride's "Vapour Trails" or MBV's "When You Sleep" in its uplifting power but ultimately melancholic tone.  Tracks 4 and 6, "Sing" and "Souvlaki Space Station", respectively, are much more experimental in nature, lacking a real chorus and consistent structure.  They serve to divide up the album so that its anthemic tendencies, as in the aforementioned "40 Days", have a chance to expose themselves.  Between these two songs is the marvelously isolating "Here She Comes".  Halstead's first words in the song, "it's so lonely in this place", perfectly define the aesthetic of the song, whose echoing guitars stand alone over a sparse percussion beat.

After the ambient sound of "Souvlaki Space Station", "When the Sun Hits" returns to the more traditional song format found in songs like "40 Days" and "Alison".  A deep guitar strain, reminiscent both of "Sometimes" from Loveless and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", is contrasted by echoing pizzicato guitars and a flowing rhythm guitar as Halstead and Goswell sing together only somewhat comprehensible lyrics.  The desperation of this song is palpable in a way few musicians have been able to match.  Next is the serene "Altogether", whose minute but impeccable flourishes bring an unspeakably beautiful but sparse musical backing to incredible heights.  "Altogether"'s musical execution is so unbelievably perfect that one can almost hear Halstead breathe as he sings, and extra musical accents are practically ravishing.  It really merits listening at high volume in a quiet room for full effect.  "Melon Yellow" is again a sort of a break from the weight of the previous two songs, but preserves the serene quality of "Altogether" despite the more ambient, less emotional, and less structured approach.  "Melon Yellow" slowly builds to a remarkable climax that leads to the incredible album finale: the sparse "Dagger".  As "Melon Yellow" comes to a gradual close, silence takes over and a single piano key signals a significant transition.  The acoustic guitars here are almost like a reintroduction to reality, as though Souvlaki were a journey through a spiritual universe and "Dagger" binds this world to our own sonically imperfect one.

What makes Souvlaki special is really the way in which it establishes its own aesthetic paradigm almost imperceptibly.  Loveless and Isn't Anything were brilliant because they very obviously broke boundaries (Slowdive would do the same on Pygmalion, an album that fuses the ultra-worldly aspects of shoegaze to an almost primal simplicity.  I wrote a review of it that is available on this page somewhere), and while Souvlaki's airy rhythm guitars make it sound special, there's an extra significance in the way in which the musical aesthetic matches the lyrical content.  Kierkegaard once wrote that he preferred Mozart's depiction of Don Juan through music to Byron's depiction of the famous seducer in poetry because the former was more fitting to the amorous content.  Well, to me it seems that the desperate loneliness of the instrumentation on Souvlaki, expressed by its sparse purity and perfection, is a perfect match for the forlorn melancholy of its lyrical content.  This makes the emotional experience of Souvlaki that much more meaningful than that of Loveless, in my mind and experience, which only extends so far as the sound breaches the boundaries of everyday musical aesthetics.  Slowdive had the benefit of learning from their venerable predecessors, and fused this aural space with its natural lyrical partner, resulting in the consummation of a more complete and powerful musical experience.

Pet Peeve

One thing I've realized kind of annoys me is when bands name themselves after 3 (always 3) random words that don't seem to have any relation to each other.  I don't think it seems lazy per se, but you'd think a band would want to give themselves a more meaningful name.

Examples:
Cooper Temple Clause
Ocean Colour Scene
Stone Temple Pilots
probably more

I guess you could argue that some bands that I like a lot, like Sunny Day Real Estate and Archers of Loaf also do the random words name thing, but I don't know.  It seems sort of cliche to name a band like that I guess

Quick Commentary: Idlewild Lyrics

So, really quickly, here are two Idlewild lines:

From "Roseability"

Stop looking through scrapbooks and photograph albums because I know that they won't teach you what you don't already know - you'll always be dissatisfied

And then a line that I had forgotten from "El Capitan"

You were looking at pictures in the distance hoping to see the future

I had never really noticed it, but these lines are both about the same thing - Roddy's fascination with photographs and their power to show us things  that we have forgotten or never knew.  I'm not quite sure what to make of it, although I definitely feel that we sometimes look to documentation of the past and try to reinterpret and reconstruct that past from it.

Anyway, I found that thought provoking, and I really do think Idlewild remains terribly underrated.  At some point they have to be universally recognized as great, don't they?  How far in the future that will be, I honestly don't know.

Also, I'm just realizing it now, but "Film of the Future" would seem to imply the same message:

I know what you think: you think this film is about you.  It isn't about you.

I'm not sure many bands have the same continuity in their lyrical themes that Idlewild shows not just here but in many of their songs on various topics.