Slowdive - everything is alive

That Slowdive do things at their own pace should not come as a surprise to anybody; there is a clue in the name, after all. But more than ever, listening to ‘everything is alive’, you get the sense that the veteran shoegazers couldn’t rush something if they’d tried. Opener ‘Shanty’ sets the tone, awash in walls of guitar-laden reverb, but it’s on track three, ‘Alife’, that it really takes off, a gorgeous pop song that has Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead trading vocals over a driving rhythm. The record is dedicated to Rachel’s mother and drummer Simon Scott’s father, both of whom died in 2020, and there is an elegiac feel in places, particularly on the gorgeous, woozy ‘Andalucia Plays’. If there’s evidence of musical progression, meanwhile, it comes via an apparently new-found fixation Neil has with modular synths; he deploys them tastefully here, perhaps to most striking effect on ‘Chained to a Cloud’. In general, though, ‘everything is alive’ very much gives off the sense that the slower gestations lead to the richest rewards.