SLOWDIVE "PYGMALION"
1995, Creation
- "Rutti" – 10:05
- "Crazy For You" – 6:01
- "Miranda" – 4:49
- "Trellisaze" – 6:22
- "Cello" – 1:42
- "J's Heaven" – 6:47
- "Visions of La" – 1:48
- "Blue Skied An' Clear" – 6:54
- "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!