classic albums, atsonicpark edition # 10: slowdive - pygmalion
 

SLOWDIVE "PYGMALION"
1995, Creation

1. "Rutti" – 10:05
2. "Crazy For You" – 6:01
3. "Miranda" – 4:49
4. "Trellisaze" – 6:22
5. "Cello" – 1:42
6. "J's Heaven" – 6:47
7. "Visions of La" – 1:48
8. "Blue Skied An' Clear" – 6:54
9. "All of Us" – 4:07

As much as I love My Bloody Valentine, the most consistent and creative of the shoegaze bands will always be Slowdive to me -- mainly because Slowdive avoided a lot of the usual trappings of the genre (there's hardly any loud guitar walls, instead replaced by echoed-to-hell vocal walls) while still maintaining a look forward into the space between emptiness, ambience, and "rock".

This album is by far the sparsest, quietest, and most introspective of Slowdive's work, but it's also the best. Everything is gently- and subtley-mixed, with the parts distributed in a way to focus on the individual elements that convey the emotional fragments of beauty, warmth, compassion, loneliness, and everything in between. Some songs remind me of the sun coming up and some remind me of the sun dissolving; perfect background music and also perfect music to lose yourself in.

Though my favorite Slowdive song isn't on here ("Souvlaki Space Station"), all the songs on here are amongst my favorites, specifically the all-too-brief "Cello" and the amazing "Blue Skied An Clear" (say what you want about the Doom Generation, but its use in that movie was amazing).

Masterpiece!

except good.

hmm didnt we already do this one? i remember me & you having a discussion on how i think the earlier stuff is better and yo usaying something else.

or am i imagining this??

we've talked about slowdive before, sure, but this is the first time i did a classics album thread for it :)

hmm i must be crazy!


i havent heard this album but i heard some songs off or the creation anthology.

The lamest Slowdive record ever.

Ditto. Not that even Souvlaki is that great an album either. I can only stomach maybe 4 songs off it and one of them is a cover. They are like another band that was knocking about at the time called Adorable, but with a helium balloon for a producer.

man you are sailing close to the breeze there.....

slowdive were amazing, possibly the most underrated british band ever, they certainly dont or didnt deserve the reaction they got from a lot of quarters.

pygmalion is an awesome beautiful an chilling album. my favourite slowdive record. ok, it doesnt have the phasers and whooshing guitars but it does have rutti. a classic if ever there was one!

oh god, no way! thats like comparing a fine wine with malt vinegar. adorable were the most suckiest bnd of all that 2nd division sucky mid nineties floppy fringe and guitar nonewwavenoscene nonsense. adorable were a poor mans menswear with the talent of the blokes from sleeper backing them up. no i cant agree less with you on this one porky. slowdive were a class band........

Yeah, slowdive are incredible and unlike anything else before or after. The only band that resonates in my mind as this emotional is perhaps Stars of the Lid..

meh, stars of the lid never did it for me. id put certain spiritualized moments in there... shine a light, broken heart, medication, 200 bars etc

Stars of the lid are fine, but there are rows of bands equally emotionally striking ... if not more.

Like Labradford.
Like Seefeel
Like Flying Saucer attack.
etc.

Pauly, perhaps you forget that Slowdive weren't considered that much cop even back then. I agree that Adorable are dreadful shit and so is the band that Piotr formed after them too, but it's incredible that Slowdive get more attention these days than they have ever deserved. At least your Rides and Swervedrivers had the decency to have a much more robust and rocking sound than this bunch of Nivea soap injesting shoegazers.

Edit - Good call on all those bands, slavo.

thats my point porky. they got sooo much bad press way back when that i believe they didnt deserve. i loved em then and now. ok, swervedriver are rockier and ride were rockier but both sucked as they grew older. but slowdive were not a rockier band. its a different kinda thing, a different gaze so to speak. rachel goswell is a sweetheart!

At the height of britpop some of the members of Slowdive used to hang around in The Good Mixer in London's Camden Towm, notorious hangout for 'Look at me!' wannabes. Were Slowdive trying to tell us something?

Souvlaki was one of my favorites from the 90's but I'd never gotten around to hearing this album until now and I'm actually a little surprised (in a good way) what a departure it is from that album. Much closer to later Talk Talk than MBV or any shoegaze kinda stuff. I never really understood how they got tossed in with that lot anyway. I always considered Souvlaki to be dream pop, not really a rock album so to speak.

I believe Slowdive was heavily influenced by Souvlaki co-producer Brian Eno to such an extent, they decided to replace their guitars with synthesizers in an attempt to emulate Brian Eno's famous "Music for Airports" LP for their third album, Pygmalion. It was a disaster, and I wasn't surprised to learn they were dropped by their record label a week after its release, as it expected a "pop album" off them! Not a self-indulgent, experimental, ambient album which had Brian Eno's style all over it!

Ride and Swervedriver tried to sound grungy! Especially Swervedriver. They were embarrassing.

One of the best bands ever.