album reviews and other stuff
10/10
Whenever I get the feeling to put on Slowdive’s Pygmalion, I get this visual of a blank, white, expansive void stretching out in front of me. Maybe I’m just being influenced by the minimalist cover art, which itself reinterprets 1950s graphic notation to further create the sense of deep unfamiliarity.
It’s such a stark contrast to the warmth, the dense and layered nature of Souvlaki. On that album, from the moment the opening chord of “Alison” bursts into your ears, to the sombre death of the record with “Dagger”, there’s never a moment where you’re alone. Even the more minimal tracks like “Here She Comes” and the dub-influenced “Sing” feel like they’re always reassuringly close, dipping their toes into the realms of ambient and minimalism but always coming back out to remind you they’re there. Couple that with gorgeous blasts of warmth, layered guitars and vulnerable, emotional lyricism and vocal performances from Neil and Rachel, and you have an album that always makes you feel at least the slightest bit familiar with your surroundings, as ethereal and dreamy as they may be.
Pygmalion drenches itself in the opposite. The opening chord of “Rutti” acts as your first indication that you’re travelling deep into the unknown. Taking cues from the likes of “Myrrhman” by Talk Talk off their sublime Laughing Stock, an album that effectively solidified one of the key approaches to post-rock as a genre in the UK in the early 90s (as did its predecessor), you’re immediately made to contend with this feeling of isolation, sparseness, and of unpredictability.
That last one seems particularly strange, considering one of the things Pygmalion is remembered for nowadays is its repetitive structure, which oftentimes draws parallels to the likes of Krautrock whilst pulling (albeit, in a massively transformed manner) bits and pieces from the dance and electronic music of the day. Yet, after that opening chord, the uncertainty as you wait for the next one to be struck feels like a lifetime passing by in all of four seconds. It’s as if you’re staring into nothing, a place completely devoid of structure, where the abstract is at the forefront.
Ian McCutcheon’s rhythmic, almost robotic drumming pushes the track forward, but the guitar stays dancing around in this uncommitted, aimless direction. All the while, Neil’s vocals are the one constant many would keep pushing on to hear. They stray from anything concrete, remaining as cryptic as you’d imagine in a situation like this. It’s taking that philosophy that was pioneered with shoegaze as a genre, of ‘vocals being used as an instrument’, and pushing it to a new level. The vocals here are your lifebuoy amongst a sea of confusion and nothingness. Cling to them, or sink into the abyss forever.
It all helps to give the words more meaning, cryptic as they may be. “Into the light of mine, inside I’ll fall” is a line that always permeates through my brain whenever I think of not just “Rutti”, but this album in general. Not because it’s a lyric that resonates with me on a personal level, or it being some well written quip, or anything like that - but how it fits to introduce you to the world of Pygmalion in the most understated but absolutely memorable fashion possible.
I might have made some vague reference to the ‘vocals as an instrument’ phenomenon of shoegaze in the paragraph before the last one, but don’t get it confused - Pygmalion is, for most of its run, the furthest thing from a shoegaze album possible. An intentional decision, taken at the behest of Neil and Rachel as the shoegazing scene in the UK at the time began to collapse around them, with Alan McGee looking for almost any excuse he could come up with to drop Slowdive from Creation Records’ roster in his constant search for ‘the next Oasis’ to add to the label in their place.
The context surrounding the record, even if it seems a little unremarkable compared to the atmospheric beauty found within its content, has always been one of the reasons I have a deep, deep respect for Pygmalion. Faced with all the odds stacked against them, staring down the barrel of Britpop and with what seems like everyone wishing for their demise, instead of pivoting to match their contemporaries (eg. Ride, Lush) and pumping out a record that is looked back on as an inessential release in their discography brought on by label pressure, Slowdive decided to double down on their never-ending search to expand their sound.
Maybe this was deliberate, their one final way of showing resilience against what Creation had become before they were kicked off the label, the album deleted, and the band disintegrated. Regardless of the reasoning behind the decision, it’s part of why they are my favourite band of all time.
After “Rutti” brings itself to a sudden halt after ten minutes of building, we are met with the sole track on the album that seems to pay homage to Slowdive’s past work. On an album almost completely devoid of walls of guitar, of those washes of sound that defined albums like Just For a Day and Souvlaki, “Crazy For You” is like one final celebration of shoegazing. It’s the death of a genre, mapped out as this subtle, slowly building, and spectacularly unchanging track, that jumps right back into its shoegazing roots just around the three minute mark as the sea of guitar many yearn to hear displays itself for one final time.
“Crazy For You” might be the single most repetitive song on the album lyrically. In fact, it’s one of the single most lyrically repetitive songs I’ve ever heard. I mean, it’s just the words ‘crazy for loving you’ repeated constantly until the track dies out. Yet, I wouldn’t take it any other way. Between Neil’s reverberated, layered vocals and that utterly beautiful, dreamy guitar line that hangs over it all, it’s a deeply honest statement that feels like it meshes so brilliantly with the sound of the track itself. It’s the sound of infatuation, played out in all its atmospheric, beautiful, heart-wrenching and never-ending ‘glory’.
Even the little things on this song make it feel like an outlier at this place on the record. The brief remnants of studio chatter that peek through at the start of the track providing a rare glimpse back to the real world. Ian’s drumming feels more human than it does on a lot of the rest of the record, even if it remains rather unchanging as the track goes.
In fact, many have pointed to the original demo version of this song, which has been available via deluxe reissues and leaks for years now, as the superior version. Arguably, the arrangement presented there might have technically been a greater stylistic fit, with the hypnotic and unchanging drum machine looping in the background matching the philosophy of the record. Yet, there’s a sparseness the final version of “Crazy For You” pulls off that the demo version just can’t match for me, in between those gorgeous swells, the sort of sparseness that reminds you of the void you find yourself in on Pygmalion. Even at the death of the song, you’re met with an almost two minute outro where there are no yearning vocals to be found. No drumming to remind you of the humanity on display. Just some slowly dying guitar feedback, that again feels symbolic of the death of shoegaze as a genre, and the gorgeous twinkle of a guitar line to slowly entrance you back into Pygmalion’s ambient soundscapes.
“Miranda” is what I find to be the ‘point of no return’ for Pygmalion. Many people I’ve asked about this song point to it as one that is more oblique, the moment where the avant-garde tinges this album holds become absolutely impossible to ignore (if they’d managed to ignore them on “Rutti”, anyway). From the constantly looping short acoustic guitar sequence, to Rachel’s angelic vocals - a Slowdive mainstay, sure, but I can’t think I can name another instance where they’ve been given such significance on a track before, maybe even since. “Sing” on Souvlaki is an example that springs to mind, but even that was backed up by a gorgeous dub-inspired instrumental that served as the perfect stage for her vocals to intertwine with.
“Miranda” features almost nothing like that, bar the acoustic guitar I mentioned previously and a brief, constantly layered vocal sample. It really highlights how angelic Rachel’s presence is across this record, somehow even more so than Neil’s already ethereal and wavering vocals. It drags you away from the structure, the more conventional and familiar sounds of “Crazy For You”, and pulls you right back into the unknown. It’s disorienting, psychedelic, and I can’t imagine the album without it.
Going even further down that route, “Trellisaze” was the song that I, a diehard fan of this album, could never quite appreciate for a good while. This is the track that pushes the disorientating and abstract sounds you’ll find throughout Pygmalion to their absolute limit. Structure on this song is almost a deliberate lie. The odd bits of percussion to be found here are sampled, provide very little to hold on to, and almost feel like they’re there to deliberately confuse you more than anything else.
Between that, the occasional bursts of cymbal crashing and guitar noise, and the quiet yet very notable feedback usage which serves as a mainstay to just top off the album’s most hypnotic moments, I feel like I can draw comparisons between this and Talk Talk’s “Taphead”, also from Laughing Stock. There’s no accident between these repeated comparisons - Halstead has gone on record to state his love of late era Talk Talk’s post-rock masterpieces, and it feels like there’s moments on Pygmalion that take concepts Talk Talk originally would have pioneered (themselves no doubt inspired by Krautrock records of the 70s) and drench them in a subtle, atmospheric sheen. It’s a formula that, whilst some might criticise for being a tad unoriginal, is one that I always find utterly fascinating. The lineage of the first wave of UK post-rock has always been something that’s up for a great deal of debate, and it’s not something this review is really cut out to deal with, but seeing concepts evolving over time through the genre naturally, despite the scene itself being fairly small and only just starting to gain steam at this point in time, is something I feel anyone can look back on and appreciate.
A short, ambient interlude, “Cello”, marks the transition back to a slightly more structured beauty. Pulling from another short acoustic guitar section, the chorus of heavenly vocals on “J’s Heaven” mark a slight return to the sounds of “Miranda” from a couple of tracks ago, as does the presence of a thick bass guitar that gives the song a rare sense of structure. You’re still in the void at the moment, searching around for something to cling to amongst the hopeless abstract that’s surrounding you.
Yet, despite that, there’s a newfound sense of melancholy, something we haven’t really felt since “Rutti”. Emotion on Pygmalion feels like something of a foreign concept, and it’s only something the album explores directly when it is confident it can pull it off. For instance, “Crazy For You” and its’ clear romantic intent, which might speak to how ridiculously simple and overwhelming those feelings can be, for an album as often sparse and cryptic as Pygmalion to be able to pull it off with no sense of holding back.
That point almost feels as if it rolls perfectly into “Visions of LA”. The final ‘interlude’ track, an acoustic ballad that is little more than what it establishes from the beginning. Rachel’s vocals are not here for pure atmospheric depth, as reverb-laden as they may be. This track feels like it marks a distinct change, in the back portion of the record. We’re moving towards something concrete, now. Although it may be short, it may be one that is often ignored by many, “Visions of LA” is a key point of structure and change within Pygmalion’s utterly cold and often oblique nothingness. It feels like it calls back to those moments of warmth on “Crazy For You”. It’s building to a climax that, deep down, the listener has been waiting for since Rutti’s first chord was played, at this point about 35 minutes ago.
And on the next track, that climax is fulfilled.
I could write words about “Blue Skied an’ Clear” for hours. I can’t even be sure if this is my personal favourite song on Pygmalion, but it’s always the one that I feel has the most place on the album. It’s the most pivotal, the most critical point on this otherwise lonely, abstract collection of songs. That’s because it feels human. It feels alive.
The verses still hold up some of the album’s most isolated, most psychedelic and hypnotic qualities. From Neil’s background vocals that feel impossible to peg down properly, to the tremolo guitar that dives in and out of the song like it’s filling in for a church organ. Everything feels slightly off, still - although it’s more densely packed than what we’ve been hearing since “Crazy For You”, there’s still this sense of wariness. The album is still bathing itself in the abstract. It’s refusing to show its true self, the true emotion that lurks within.
And yet, in that chorus, everything breaks.
It feels like you’ve emerged into a green, grassy field on a summer’s day. Neil’s vocals turn to these gorgeous, emotion filled chants (“you say love, and it sounds so good…”), as an almost angelic section of guitar lines float around your ears. In most cases, it is the percussion on a track that can totally reinterpret how the other elements sound - in this case, I feel like it’s the other elements that you can find aside from the percussion that change how you view everything else. “Blue Skied an’ Clear” is a song that is loving, incomprehensibly heart-warming, a rush of blood to the head.
There’s no wonder that parallels can easily be drawn between this and Talk Talk’s spiritual masterpiece, “I Believe In You”. Yet, whereas on that track the emotion was provided via Mark Hollis’ sobering lyricism and pained vocal cries, “Blue Skied…” elicits the emotion via the contrast it presents with the rest of Pygmalion. It opens up, and finally reveals everything in an utterly climactic moment.
Even if you think it might be ridiculous to call albums things that can be considered ‘alive’, I feel fairly confident in saying that this track feels like Pygmalion’s soul being laid bare. It is a moment of utter vulnerability on a work so abstract, cryptic and cold, that the impact of its gorgeous swells cannot physically be overstated.
That might be part of why the closing track, “All of Us”, is so heart wrenching. It sounds defeated, after the triumph that was heard on “Blue Skied…”. Even after a moment of utter beauty, of imagining an escape from the album’s sparseness and evasive soundscapes, Slowdive’s position as a band was so untenable, so utterly beyond saving at this time in their career that there was no way those feelings could persist into reality.
“All of Us” is a eulogy. A eulogy to a band who, at the time, were detested, generally misunderstood, ignored, and never given the chance they deserved to shine. As the closing track in Slowdive’s discography, this must have been the most heart-wrenching way to possibly close things out. Even despite the later formation of Mojave 3 and Slowdive’s eventual successful reunion, it’s almost impossible to look back on Pygmalion and not, for just a moment, be transported back to a band in their dying days.
Pygmalion serves as an escape from the real world, to a place often devoid of emotion and of anything to latch onto in the slightest. It’s for these reasons that the striking humanity it displays, alongside its radical sparseness and embracing of silence, make it undoubtedly my favourite record in Slowdive’s discography.
Many may consider it imperfect, a poor follow up to the shoegazing bliss demonstrated on their first two records. Things couldn’t be further from the truth.