Two beats into "shanty" and the whole room tilts. The guitars don't so much enter as appear, like light through a fogged window. Slowdive have been back for a decade and a half now, and their fifth album sounds strangely like the obvious next step from their self-titled record, not like a band revisiting old tricks. Simon Scott's drums lock into a motorik pulse on "andalucia plays," the bass pushes everything forward on "alife," and somewhere in the middle of "kisses" Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell's voices weave together the way they have since before half the people buying this were born.
This started as a more electronic record, Halstead says in the press notes. Modular synths in his home studio. Then the band got in the room and the reverb-drenched guitars reasserted themselves. You can hear both impulses in the finished thing. The clean synth line that opens "chained to a cloud" could have come from a different genre entirely, but it folds into the guitar shimmer without a fight. Shawn Everett mixed six of eight tracks, and the production has a wide-open quality that keeps the layers from turning into mush. There are moments where a single note hangs in the air for what feels like minutes.
Two members lost parents during the making of this record, and something about that period found its way into the emotional territory. The band says "kisses" is their surest pop moment yet. That might be overselling it for a song that drifts more than it hits, but there's a clarity here that wasn't always on Souvlaki. The vinyl cut was done by Chris Muth, who worked on the album with Heba Kadry mastering. Good pressing sounds enormous. The 16/44 FLAC will do fine if the turntable is off but this wants loud speakers and a room you can stand in the middle of.
