Now that I'm finally getting over the loss of my wisdom (or did I gain wisdom? I haven't quite figured that out yet, I guess), I hope to be able to post a lot more. And I feel like this is a pretty damn good album to kick things off with.
Slowdive often gets lost in the shuffle of the 90s British shoegaze movement, which is a damn shame because they may well be the most pure representation of the genre. Masterpieces such as Ride's Nowhere and MBV's Loveless are given considerable praise, and rightly so, but Just For a Day, released the same year as Loveless and only one year after Nowhere, is criminally underrated and underappreciated. Even among Slowdive fans, preferential status is often given to their second album, Souvlaki, which was released two years later. And while Souvlaki is a damn fine album, for me it's never been able to top their debut.
This album conjures up all of the metaphorisms for shoegaze: dreamy, hazy, lush, ethereal. But whereas Ride is sometimes just a little too poppy and MBV sometimes is just a little too harsh, Slowdive's debut doesn't do anything terribly fancy. You have your layered, delayed guitar washing over the tracks, giving each of the tracks a very tranquil, almost lazy sensation--at least to start with. Slowdive very carefully manipulated the dynamics of each track, breathing life and individual spirit into each song without overdoing it. The crescendo on the final track (Primal), for example, is different from, say, your average post-rock crescendo, in that it gradually builds from soft to loud in a way that very few bands, even great bands, are able to do. It's the subtleties such as these that complete the album: the rhythmic, hypnotic drumming of the opener Spanish Air, the triplets throughout Ballad of Sister Sue, the simple but chillingly melancholic piano line softly repeated throughout Erik's Song.
If you're a fan of shoegaze and haven't heard this yet, you owe it to yourself to give this a listen.
Catch the breeze
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