slowdive – everything is alive review

One of Nirvana’s recurring early visual motifs was that of Kurt Cobain hurling himself into either Chad Channing’s, or later Dave Grohl’s, drum kit. The amount of damage done would vary but if there was any regret it was rarely expressed in public. It figured: The soon to be famous trio after all in the eyes of many were a hardcore, punk rock and roll band, seemingly bound by the code of performance, the unwritten artist-audience contract which demanded reciprocity, the exchange of energies, and an eye for an eye.

Many music journalists, then still gatekeepers of fame and popularity, loved this apparent crush on rusting macho values, despite it later being revealed that spiritually Nirvana were the antithesis of these self-defeating tropes.

Back in Britain their attention moved onto shoegaze, a movement which held stasis and disconnection above everything; live, the popular cliché was that most ‘gazers would barely move or acknowledge there was an audience there, a conscious, some said conceited rejection of spectacle.  Revelling in their power as scene breakers, by 1993 the inky tide had turned against anyone who had more than two pedals and Shoegaze was unofficially declared shoegone.     

Slowdive would collectively admit that in their formative stages – their debut EP Holding Our Breath appeared in 1991 to rave reviews – they were obtuse, perhaps difficult. They after all were teenagers from unfashionable Reading, but a group who quickly became aware that exposure was a double-edged sword. Speaking in the Independent, singer Rachel Goswell recalled that backstage at the Reading festival in the same year, a snarky unidentified correspondent told them “You’ll be stacking shelves in Tescos within six months.” The band eventually dissolved in 1995 after the release of their third album, the startlingly ambitious Pygmalion, but by then Britpop was at its peak and almost nobody was listening.

Of a genre list few in the increasingly technology-obsessed noughties would’ve chosen shoegaze for a revival. And yet, starting initially with a generation of younger musicians who were toddlers when Loveless and Going Blank Again were released, it’s since found a rising global currency. Following that energy, having previously sworn to never reconcile Ride were playing shows again by 2014, in the process joining a newly reformed slowdive.

Three years later a self-titled fourth album was released and met with – presumably to some cynicism from Goswell and co. – a warm reaction from a now largely de-clawed media. This year a stunning Glastonbury performance was accompanied by the single Kisses, a track which St. Etienne may have once made and a sweetly pitched rebuttal to those expecting only sonic cathedrals of sound. For a band once so vilified that the caustic environment left Goswell with repeated panic attacks, the stage was set with everything is alive for the completion of a renaissance.

If there was any collective sense of intimidation at this duty, there is no hint of it amongst the album’s economic eight track, forty-minute sweep. Kisses is the exception rather than the rule; Motorik opener shanty pulses vibrantly, but it’s followed straight after by the meditative instrumental prayer remembered, it’s guitars turning back time and again from the temptation of breaking their solemn envelope. 

This understatement doesn’t equate to the quintet staring at their pumps. Closer the slab is a study in animation, ascent and descents in patterns, a loop that throws off power, whilst skin in the game reveals itself as the only backwards glance into the past, an MBV-esque drone which smears noise over emotions.

The apex moment though is to be found via chained to a cloud, in form nearly seven hypnotic minutes centred around a gentle drum break, fragile, shape shifting noise and translucent vocals which combine to bury the idea that this is a band with which it’s hard to connect. 

Everything is alive finds slowdive confidently swimming with a tide they helped to first create, but whilst the world since has changed, their rejection of tricks and mis directions is now the most contemporary thing about them. No drum kits were destroyed in its making.