Slowdive
Pygmalion

Once upon a time in the early '90s, there were the Shoegazers: those who, while playing, stared at their shoes because they felt uncomfortable being watched by people; a narcoleptic, stunning, piercing, and angelic music all at once. By 1995, little was left of that movement. Slowdive came from two consecutive masterpieces "Just For a Day" and "Souvlaki", I've heard many times certain listeners say that when it comes to Slowdive, one must have the first two, and I can only feel deep compassion for such figures.

There's an air of silent revolution in the third and last "Pygmalion". Shoegaze remains only a pretext to cross the boundaries of dreams; post-rock claims victims even among the shoegazers, the dreampop of the earlier albums turns to post-rock (like Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis), the result is a rarefaction, the tracks are fundamentally acoustic and fluid, sometimes elementary in structure, minimal (but without Velvet-like memories of isolationists like Spiritualized), the long “Rutty” is pure abstraction, the metaphysics of incompleteness, the voices distant and profound, thanks to a wise use of sustain. And trance, fueled by an impalpable infinite guitar; "Miranda" is simply fantastic, coursed by a sampling of a female voice that instills incredible melancholy; "Trellisaze" is disturbing and noisy, not loud; "Blue Skied an'Clear" could have been written by the most mystical Talk Talk of Spirit of Eden (for me, the song remains the evocative peak of Slowdive). The spiritual intensity is fully reconfirmed even after this Radiohead-like operation of "How to Disappear Completely".

This is the album that Sigur Ros couldn't make even after a pact with the devil, you either have class or you don't, and the Ros just don't have it. Pygmalion remains far above the progression of Rossian songs, since the crescendo, when there is one, is always embedded within the track and does not appear as an amorphous mass of singing on the horizon. Today, in 2005, when we listen to these albums from a decade ago and let ourselves be carried away by these new-age ecstasy vocal caresses, we miss such idyllic bands that didn't yield a millimeter to the overwhelming power of the Majors.