Since their reunion, Slowdive seems to be a vastly better touring band than they were in their heyday. I think it helps that they’ve brought on more touring musicians to fill out the sound. According to the band on Twitter, it’s just the original five members.
Here they are covering Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair” (from that post-Pink Floyd recording session here he never played anything the same way twice). The Barrett original is some two minutes long, and the original cover Slowdive did was four minutes long. This version is eight minutes long, and ends with one of the most beautiful, multiguitar Shoegaze solos ever recorded. (No wonder that one woman in the audience looks like she’s having a religious experience…)
This was recorded at the Best Kept Secret festival in The Netherlands on Saturday, June 21, 2014.
The sound quality is not the best, and the vocals pretty much suck, but this cover by Alcian Blue (AKA The Antiques) is still the best live cover of “Primal” I’ve heard from anyone (including Slowdive, who only played it at early shows, and not particularly well).
Like I’ve said before, anyone doing good cover of “Primal” will get linked in this space.
As for Slowdive, their new tour shows their live shows have improved considerably, as we shall see next Sunday…
I really am on a Slowdive cover kick. Skies of Ember is a Filipino band, and although it says so nowhere in the title or description, this video is actually a live instrumental cover of Slowdive’s “Catch the Breeze.”
Evidently I just can’t get enough of Slowdive covers. Here’s the now defunct (or on hiatus) Center of the Sun doing a crunchy, guitar-drenched cover of “Machine Gun.”
They also did a cover of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.” Obviously this is a band on my wavelength…
Here’s an ethereal electronica cover of Slowdive’s “Machine Gun” by (if I’m decrypting the credits correctly) “Dick Isreal and The Soothsayer with Neon Signal.” So a teamup of three musical entities I’ve never heard of.
I think Amy Archibald is The Soothsayer, and has a beautiful (albeit highly processed) voice on this song. I’m guessing the “Lightwave” of the video title is the theoretical genre this belongs to. Whatever it is it’s very pretty…
Were it not for Slowdive’s Just for a Day, I wouldn’t being doing these Shoegazer Sunday posts in the first place. Poking around YouTube, there seems to be a lot more Slowdive songs that never made it onto their three studio albums than I realized. “Losing Today,” a sad, echoey, moody piece perfect for teenage girls to mope around to on cold, rainy days, is off their Blue Day compilation album.
So I’ve been meaning to do some sort of comprehensive post on my love of obscure Shoegazer bands. But instead of one big post, I’ve decided to start parceling out little nuggets of Shoegazer goodness every Sunday.
If you’re unfamiliar with Shoegazer music, think of reverb-and-sustain-drenched guitars backing songs drifting between the poles of rock, pop, and ambient, with a little prog and psychedelia thrown in for good measure.
We start off with Slowdive, which is actually one of the least obscure shoegazer bands out there. I first heard “Catch the Breeze” on WHFS the one year I spent in the DC area. (Actually. WHFS was one of the few things that didn’t suck about living up there.) Later on I picked up Just for a Day, which I’ve always thought of as the definitive Shoegazer album. (I’ve never been able to get into My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, despite my best intentions. Maybe it’s the screechy, annoyingly high-pitched sounds scattered on many of the tracks. Or maybe it’s the sonic quality that sounds like someone recorded the entire thing in a bathtub on a Realistic cassette recorder after they’d dropped it down a stairwell a few times using factory-second Certron tapes.) Of the songs off that, “Primal” has long been my favorite, as it has a perfect, wistful descending chord progression at the start. But I haven’t found a good video for that.
Instead, here’s “Shine.” This is a pre-Just For a Day songs off one of their early EPs.
Interestingly enough, there’s another fine Shoegazer song called “Shine” (also not available as an embeddable video) from the short-lived band Lowsundays. I prefer the short version off the Projekt Spring 2001 Sampler.