Shoegaze Takes A Slowdive

Slowdive
College Street Music Hall
New Haven
Feb. 4, 2025

There was a slow, two-minute build. The drums began to accelerate and subdivide. The bass switched its pattern, following the drums’ rhythm. The sung melody soared over it all, an angelic wordless wail. Other lines moved in and out, from guitars and electronics, somehow both floating and gathering energy. The lights around the crowd and stage slowly multiplied and became more colorful.

Finally, it erupted. The lights started flashing, impossibly fast. The music consumed itself, becoming an onslaught of noise that pummeled bobbing heads and waving arms in the audience. All the while, the line of musicians at the front of the stage — Slowdive members Rachel Goswell (vocal, guitar, synth), Neil Halstead (vocal, guitar), Christian Savill (guitar), Nick Chaplin (bass), and Simon Scott (drums) — were motionless, staring out at the crowd or down at the row of pedals and flashing lights by their feet.

Slowdive, which played College Street Music Hall on Tuesday evening as part of an international tour, is one of the architects of the genre now known as shoegaze. The name ​“shoegaze,” it’s said, started as a dig against the bands by a journalist watching the scene develop in the late 1980s in the United Kingdom. The musicians made the label their own.

For good reason: hallmarks of the shoegaze sound include guitars run through a menagerie of pedals and effects, the vocals so obscured they almost sound like a guitar themselves, and the musicians with their heads pointed down, their eyes to the floor. 

Shoegaze put its name on the musical map in 1991, when Irish-English band My Bloody Valentine released its second and by far most famous album Loveless. The music on Loveless is about as thick and creamy as music can get. It flows and drones, an ocean of guitars and vocals and synthesizers recorded and layered over the course of two years in 19 different studios. It set the template for what shoegaze is: drones, guitars with lots and lots of effects, distorted vocals, and an onslaught of sounds that are so layered no one sound can be distinguished from the rest.

Following the release of Loveless, many bands threw their hat in the ring, but Slowdive rose above the others with its second album, Souvlaki, released two years after Loveless. The album followed in Loveless’s footsteps with droning guitars and washed out vocals, but where Loveless is pounding and dense for its entire duration, Souvlaki isn’t afraid to become a little sparser at times. It ebbs and flows. Where Loveless is more earnest, Souvlaki is a little more sardonic; the band pulled the album’s name from an obscene prank-call skit by the comedy duo The Jerky Boys. With its sonic landscape, tongue-in-cheek lyrics, and sparser take on the genre, Souvlaki has turned to have a long-lasting echo.

At College Street, Slowdive showed why the band’s music has had staying power. By 7:08, nearly an hour before the music started, the first section was already packed with people: a sardine can of younger people in ribbed sweaters, bangs, and alternative outfits, along with older Gen-Xers who looked like they were in a noisy band in high school. Everyone was cast in deep blue light. It looked like it was going to smell like cigarettes and weed.

By the time the music started, it smelled like cigarettes and weed. Opening act Quannnic began with riffs that were reminiscent of 1990s grunge, performing a sweeping set of harsh, dirty shoegaze. The hard, deliberate drums supported sparse and booming bass, which in turn supported dense guitar parts. The vocals were a wail of vowels that matched the ringing guitar solos. The band was lit only by multicolored beams of light strobing the stage, casting them and the audience in shadow. At one point, smoke filled the stage, obscuring the band, with flashes of pink light turning the band into silhouettes as their wall of sound flooded the room.

In its set, Slowdive showed that it was and still is quintessential shoegaze. On a few selections, such as ​“Dagger,” they delivered a sparser ballad supported by low drones with the lyrics at the forefront. But the set began with the bass player playing a synth line that then looped, faded and returned, pulsing like an organ. The guitars began to layer alongside the bass and drums. Naaaaaaaa-naaaaa-naaa, said the guitar. The vocals answered, the lyrics less important than the energy they delivered: Aaaah-aaahhhh-ooooooooooh. It was almost spiritual, an ear-splitting wave of sound washing over the audience, making them sway as they listened with rapt attention. As the show progressed, the three guitar players swapped guitars after almost every song.

The College Street show proved that shoegaze still has a place in the world. With now three generations coming out to support the music, Slowdive’s live sound was as refined and celestial as it was three decades ago.