My Review:
Slowdive - Souvlaki
In the complexity of needs is necessary to explore and leave everything behind: the suitcase is in our mind, in the directions to take and in the will to reach the indefinite, the unknown.
That is probably what the shoegaze band with the sexiest sound did, those Slowdive that with Eps and their debut album had excited thousands of souls into dreams and led them to impulses close to rapture.
Just For A Day changed the musical sky, marked the need for many to rummage through its jewels and enjoy a breath of oxygen composed of atoms of velvet-skinned music to the ninth degree.
Then the band packed that suitcase I mentioned before and wrote a new chapter of amazement.
Because it is by surprising oneself that one puts a distance between oneself and what one has done in the past, which is often the very mental limit for exploring new territories.
The sonic fairy tale writers from Reading have learnt to paint clouds by dancing, smiling, corrupting sadness towards the most determined melancholy with the handbrake on. And this is how Souvlaki has found a way to give the band freshness and more luminosity to their talent, which, I would like to remind and specify, is not caused by the beauty of the compositions, but by the agility with which they find the needs and ways to write songs that are the only expression of all this. For many, the five have lost the courage to experiment, whereas in my opinion, if this is the most important thought (not for me, let us be clear), they have done so precisely because they have created new clothes for themselves, in their approach and in their performance.
It is an album that represents difficult moments, especially for Neil, who managed to penetrate his soul by giving his hands structures that exchange affection between heaven and planet Earth.
It is a work full of colours, wide-ranging atmospheres, which move nimbly, making it a den of surprises and admirable insights: the compositional form is diluted, the sound becomes more important and gives the songs a soft but at the same time solid dress.
It feels like entering into a fairytale, a reading that becomes a movie for our eyes because of a sensation that grips us all in the poetry of sound architectures that are always agile and intimate. It is not only rarefaction of sound but also of one's own beats, of breaths that seek entrances. It is a way to leave this now dirty and dusty ground to raise our gaze into the currents of the sky: Souvlaki becomes just that, the set of heavenly vocalizations with sensory movements which paralyses and guides towards the ecstasy, that puts the right distance between boredom and the tribulations of existence. It creates a parenthesis, a chance to conjoin a limpid extreme that seemed unattainable. The guitars prove capable of bending sublime sound waves, moving everything towards a sound that glues us to listen, nourishes the psychedelic part by transforming it into pulsating paths of Shoegaze and Alternative, to balance the order of beauty towards the explosion.
The songwriting is breezy, pop, romantic, it strips away the idea and concept of Shoegaze to bring it to the banks of the melodic river contemplating new connections, thus distributing new spells and sprinkling the reservoir of this genre with new vibrant possibilities.
Everything seems to have been conceived in the hyperbaric room where playful and dreamlike activity meet, to create the defence of their creative process. Here we find acoustic guitars, unreleased stop-and-go, new sound assemblages that enter the heart with their lightness and brightness.
I define it as an album that integrates and creates distance in the first part of their career, a robust (and successful) attempt to separate a sound that is multiple and capable of being stimulating, relevant and fundamental to many new bands, to make it a drop and a feather and begin a new flight, that trespasses and leaves us behind, open-mouthed. It is not easy to grasp and even more to take possession of all its beauty without being calm and methodical in studying it, because we are faced with new exercises in style and the magnets that are released from their past must be loved, without fear.
There is a notable identity push, a divergence, a proceeding towards an emotional impact that grows, track by track, with the hourglass smiling happily, since it witnesses a path that certifies clear ideas, driven not only by talent but above all by a structural work that is in any case avant-garde of Shoegaze.
A really effective listening not only reveals the content of the album but also puts us in a position to see our thoughts stratified, amplified to bring out our needs for a continuous afflatus, towards what releases all toxins inside emptiness. Once this happens Souvlaki becomes a generous and precious friend.
And then swimming in the placid, clean waters of these tracks will be not a pleasant pastime, but a precious ally for our mental and physical balance.
Like a bouquet from the end of the millennium, Souvlaki is able to carry the scents of a time that, although fatigued, is still capable of inebriating: not everything is to be thrown away in the last decade of the 20th century and this album offers surgical brushstrokes of diamonds in perennial form, without wear and tear. Bass lines like rubber hammers not to hurt, shadowy guitars, massive without overflowing and silvery and restless.
One experiences the gallant introspection of a flow of energy channelling towards extreme latitudes. With its visceral approach, this group of candles with their faint flames succeeds in making possible a listening experience that turns out to be a carrier of frost and rainbows held by a thread: only ignorance could let them escape.
So let there be room for the fluctuating wanderings of atoms connected to the candid and forbidding abundance of melodic, almost nostalgic lines, a modality that would seem illogical from such young guys. But there is a conscious maturity in them: they are elected by the state of grace and the gods. Their dreamlike distortions are the handmaidens of the marriage between perfection and enchantment, amidst non-stop acrobatics.
And when the notes seem sad, we discover their own happiness: it is all situated in dynamics that suspend feelings to make them subtle and volatile. They seem capable of fading the typical manner of those years that tended to make shoegaze a cliché. They go further.
A precious album, conceived with love for love, that is a supernova not only in the sky of Reading, as from this work many suggestions become inspirations, aspirations for new bands aimed at having the same way of controlling the evolution and specification of an artistic path, with the strength of a fragility that becomes a feather in our fears.
In the delicacy of this musical advent, one arrives at the lucid sensation of being overwhelmed by dreams and realities that have managed to locate themselves in those notes, clinging to the band's need to get married with this row of blue-faced beats.
But if all this doesn't convince you, because you are too bound to their debut, please be honest and curious listening to Rachel's voice: she who has created a new way of singing surpasses herself and makes her presence even smaller, but even more shining is the meaning, the capacity of a song that kisses fragility, exhaustion, fear and becomes a heartbeat with reverberation in the heart. A girl who knows how to be powerful without vocalizations, who is able to make you dream and feel all the lightness of the world even in moments of difficulty, because she is capable of making her instrument agree with the infinity of the universe. And the new compositions, more intimate and dilated, are perfectly compacted by this inclination of hers to be the girl who sings with her voice just hinted, almost hiding it, so as not to disturb. With Neil, the amalgam has grown and the interplay of alternating and sharing singing parts reaches the throne of perfection, unquestionably. There is no need to give the power of the record exaggerated singing because Souvlaki lives inside the heartstrings and radiates the mind with ease, gliding over magical guitars that become the airport from which to separate from all the other bands for a unique flight. Souvlaki was released when the flame of grunge was extinguishing and thus made people feel the need to listen in order not to forget Seattle and its surroundings. Britpop was coming out as a healthy illusory catastrophe and on average everything that was extraordinarily unique about the record of the guys from Reading was not approached in the right way. Revolutionary (many would have realised this guiltily late), the guitars came to Ambient music, with the pedals adept at creating carpets of new and innovative magic, displaying miles and miles of versatility, still capable of remaining extremely valid today. They were able to deceive the pressure of the second album, which for many had to repeat the amazement generated by the first (Brian Eno's self-imposed presence was reduced to a minimum, a sign of an immense and confident character), writing songs like oxygen cylinders of their own treasure chests, new stars elected by the heavens for eternity, making this second act the most loved by the vast majority of people who adore these impenetrable guys. The reasons lie within the mystery that three decades have yet to explain. And when you can't explain a mystery, the attraction, the devotion become the combination for eternal life.
Through it all, what follows will not be a true description of each of their songs, but an act of love with open arms, because you can embrace these heavenly whispers, learn them by heart, play them, but you will always be kept away from understanding their richness, and that is the attraction you cannot escape...
Song by Song
Alison
It is traditional 60's pop in a soft dress, able to bring the gaze into Neil's sly cat voice. In the refrain, Rachel's effective contribution launches the song towards a meeting between psychedelic The Byrds and the clouds of Reading.
Machine Gun
Pure rarefaction: the debut here returns in its evidence, a unique episode that reveals how DNA cannot be forgotten, even if only for a moment. Moving, it vibrates inside guitars full of sulphur and sunshine, in the afternoon in need of magic, while Rachel fascinates us forever with her enchanting coloured uvula.
40 Days
And here we have a new example of this evolution: pop fragments, a predisposition to the verse in which to cradle the melody like a waiting sowing, then creating the instrumental part as a true attraction towards the full abandonment of the senses.
Sing
A composition that detects the experimentation necessary to approach new shores, it sees the presence of Brian Eno, who probably picked up signals of life on Mars. We gravitate into the astonishment of an unexpected hypnosis, a surfing on drumming made ethereal and almost distant, with Rachel's voice revealing a smile from that planet, with the electronic part advancing between psychedelia and new age.
Here She Comes
This track knocks on Brian's angelic keyboards, with slide guitars pregnant with subtle, liquid, melancholy glimmers, for a journey inside the thin line of the glimpsed fairytale.
Souvlaki Space Station
With a beginning reminiscent of the mighty riffs of Héroes Del Silencio, the song soon travels inside the bubble of dust and sweetness blended perfectly, to make this long demonstration of class the base for the unattainable voice of Rachel, Goddess of the heart, mother of dreams made of kisses. A sea of guitars like divine waves to allow pauses and new beginnings to keep the tension of joy at incredible levels.
When the Sun Hits
The gods return to decide that a song can be their breath, amidst the melancholic lanes of descriptions that are transparent-faced paintings. Rapture, the magnet of every dream made real, a pulsing globe of blessed magnificence, this is the point from which ideas and impressions separate to compact, together with powerful brushstrokes and riffs, towards the garden of absolute pleasure. And the place to experience the impulses of a sun in need of affection: Slowdive give it in incredible quantities with the perfect song.
Altogether
The waters slow down, the senses remove the frost from their skin and play in the decadent but at the same time very sweet ballad that sees the guys legitimise the remarkable impact of a crescendo that doesn't need to explode to contaminate our listening pleasures: it remains a sweet caress of two hundred and twenty seconds, essential to share their delicate propulsions.
Melon Yellow
Neil dresses his voice in salt and honey, the music, subtle and delicate, like a sleeping thunderbolt, manages to feel the urgency of visiting chills by whispering its presence, bewitching the atmosphere with magnificent effectiveness.
Dagger
The first idea of what will become the Mojave 3 project, giving space to the need to make the movement of clouds acoustic, the track is a breath of light, among the voices that combine with the need to sink dreams into welcoming lungs.
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
16th July 2022
https://open.spotify.com/album/53eHm1f3sFiSzWMaKOl98Z?si=G6X80XcTT4WeyxgnPlbdbg
