The silky shoegaze beauty of Slowdive’s 1993 masterpiece, ‘Souvlaki’
Shoegaze is a genre that’s not especially known for evoking strong emotions in its listeners. In fact, one could argue that a main idea behind the genre in which bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain and t Mazzy Star have built strong repertoires is to keep your emotions flowing without bubbling over.
But that’s not to say that shoegaze is a bloodless, emotionless, clinical genre of music either.
It’s only that the genre seems to have an indirect route to touching your emotions. For the best songs in the genre(inadvertently or not) evoke memories that seem to lurk just beneath your consciousness.
Since most memories would have emotions connected to them these allied emotions wash over you even as the waves of music enter your ears, even as the memory images- some faded like in an old photo album, some surprisingly vivid even with the passing of time- keep surfacing in your mind.
You can say it’s a slowdive into a memory pool in which emotions are an added element- the ancillary and never the center but not by any means insignificant.
Slowdive- that also happens to be the name of one of the best shoegaze bands.
Formed in 1989, the English band released their album ‘Souvlaki’ in 1993.(The name refers to a Greek meat dish. It was inspired by a skit in which a man tells someone his wife will suck his cock like Souvlaki because he is Greek and his wife loves ‘the greek shit.’ Go figure.)
Though the album is now widely considered as a shoegaze masterpiece, it wasn’t warmly received when it was originally released.
With progressive rock like chord progressions sometimes looped over asynchronous beats, and thickly overlaid with silky dream-like vocals, it’s possible that the album may have been ahead of its time- occupying a space between the works of such older progressive bands like King Crimson and the lounge and chill-pop sensibilities of bands to come like Coldplay.
Slowdive has made just four albums till date(the last of which- a self titled album- came in 2017.) But even within this limited repertoire, they have given us many songs which are ‘memory machines’ that transport us to former times and states of mind.
Their second album, Souvlaki- containing ten tracks with contributions from ambient music maestro, Brian Eno- is perhaps their crowning achievement. It’s certainly a memorable album of quietly mighty proportions.
