Pitchfork评测Slowdive新专everything is life

Since forming over three decades ago, the UK shoegaze band’s fifth album is the first to shoulder the weight of those years. The music is wispier, more skeletal, attuned to and aware of fading glories.

自三十多年前成立以来，这支英国shoegaze乐队的第五张专辑是第一张承担了那些年的重担。音乐更柔和，更骨感，更协调的音程以及意识到乐队日益衰落的灵感。

Slowdive were a band built for eternal youth: They were teenagers, only 15 when they met and started rehearsing, not yet 20 when they found themselves signing with the legendary Creation Records, suddenly label mates with bands like My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub. They were riding the crest of a scene predicated on the intensity of adolescent feelings, and like all adolescent feelings, it ended, decisively and dramatically: When the press turned on shoegaze in favor of Britpop, the turn was as decisive as getting dumped senior year by your first love. Their “last” album, 1995’s experimental and loop-based Pygmalion, was dubbed—admiringly—as “career suicide.”

Slowdive是一个为永恒的青春而建立的乐队：当他们是青少年只有15岁，他们相遇并开始排练时，他们自己与传奇的Creation唱片公司签约时还不到20岁，突然与My Bloody Valentine和Teenage Fanclub等乐队搭档。他们驾驭一个以青少年情绪的强度的场景是专辑前提的高潮，像所有青少年的感情一样，它果断而戏剧性地结束了：当媒体转向支持英国流行音乐时，这个转折就像大四时被你的初恋甩掉一样绝情。他们的“最后一张”专辑，1995年的实验性和基于片段循环的专辑“Pygmalion”，被令人钦佩地称为“职业自杀”。

It takes an extraordinary tenderness toward the resonance of teenage feelings to return to a band like this, after 22 years away—after marriage, children, and divorce, greying hair. But tenderness has always been one of Slowdive’s key virtues. Maybe owing to the fact that Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead were childhood friends since age 5, their music always glowed with a familial affection that was hard to quantify or point to: When they played together, or when their whispering voices swirled together, it always felt like the continuation of a private conversation between two former kids.

在结婚、孩子、离婚、白发的22年后，回到这样的乐队需要对青少年超越温柔的感情共鸣。但温柔一直是Slowdive音乐关键的优点之一。也许由于Rachel Goswell和Neil Halstead从5岁起就是儿时的朋友，他们的音乐总是闪耀着难以量化或能表达意图的家庭情感：当他们一起演奏时，或者当他们的低语声一起缠绕在一起时，总是感觉就像两个前孩子之间私人对话的延续。

In 2023, Slowdive are, improbably, the closest thing the strange and ephemeral shoegaze scene has to “survivors”—a band that can still play its catalog to festival audiences decades later, whose new songs occasion cheers instead of drink-line evacuations. Their self-titled 2017 comeback felt exultant: with its thick, overdriven guitars and bolder, cleanly etched pop choruses, it might be the loudest record in Slowdive’s catalog, an invigorated blast from old friends who have fallen joyfully back into each other’s company again.

在2023年，Slowdive不太可能是不寻常而短暂的shoegaze音乐里最接近“幸存者”——一个几十年后仍然可以在音乐节里向观众表演音乐的乐队，他们的新歌会欢呼，而不是一点让乐迷兴趣都没有。他们同名的2017年复出让人欣喜若狂：凭借其厚实的过载吉他构筑的音墙和更大胆、清晰的流行合唱，这可能是Slowdive目录中最响亮的唱片，这是老朋友的振奋人心激动的心情，他们再次高兴地回到了彼此的陪伴中。

On everything is alive, those two former kids look up, startled and amused to discover the wrinkles on each other’s faces. It’s the first record where you can hear, and feel, the weight of those previous years, and the shadows of the losses that etch the contours of a life entering its 50s. The music is wispier, more skeletal—a gust of distortion from 2017’s “Sugar For the Pill” would blow it all away. Ironically, it’s the closest they’ve come since reforming to recreating the sound of 1993’s glimmering, jewel-like Souvlaki, but it’s been darkened and complicated by age and perspective. This isn’t summer music; this is sunset music, attuned to and aware of fading glories.

一切都是充满生机的，当这两个曾经的孩子抬起头来，惊讶而又有趣地发现对方脸上逐渐老去的皱纹。这是第一张你能听到并感受到时光流逝的沉重，以及一个步入50岁的人的人生轮廓上所留下的失去亲人的阴影的唱片。这首歌的音乐更柔和，更骨感——2017年的《Sugar For The Pill》的失真风会把这一切都吹走。具有讽刺意味的是，这是他们自转型以来最接近于重现1993年那首闪闪发光、像宝石一样的Souvlaki的声音，但它因年龄和视角而变得黯淡和复杂。这不是夏日音乐;这是日落的音乐，更协调的音程以及意识到乐队日益衰落的灵感。

Part of that haunted feeling emerges from the vocals—on “skin in the game” and “andalucia plays,” Halstead’s voice sounds slightly harrowed, closer to Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan than to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid. That character alone, like the appearance of crow’s feet on a handsome leading actor’s face, imparts an appealingly rueful, seen-it-all cast to the music. There is a lot of shared life bound up in the Slowdive project now, after all. Since the group began sessions in April 2020—and then quickly abandoned them for six months as the world shut down—Goswell’s mother and drummer Simon Scott’s father died. Slowdive lyrics are largely imagistic, not narrative, but it doesn’t take much interpretation to pick up mournful signs flashing past in Halstead’s words: “Time runs on once more/Another ghost is born/I feel like change will come/When the night rolls in,” he sings on album opener “shanty.”

部分闹鬼的感觉从人声中浮现出来——在歌曲“skin in the game”和“andalucia plays”上，Halstead的声音听起来略显痛苦，更接近Yo La Tengo的Ira Kaplan，而不是Jesus and Mary Chain的Jim Reid。仅仅这个角色，就像一个英俊的男主角脸上的乌鸦脚的出现，给音乐带来了一种诱人的懊悔、看得见的演员。毕竟，现在在Slowdive项目中有很多共同的生活。自该组织于2020年4月开始会议以来——然后在世界疫情封锁时迅速放弃了他们六个月制作音乐的时光——Goswell的母亲和鼓手Simon Scott的父亲去世了。Slowdive的歌词在很大程度上是想象的，而不是叙事性的，但不需要太多的解释就能捕捉到Halstead的话中闪过过去的悲伤迹象：“时间又过去了/另一个鬼魂诞生了/我觉得变化会到来/当夜幕降临时，”他在专辑开场曲“shanty”中唱道。

Halstead initially conceived of everything is alive as a minimal techno record, closer in spirit to Pygmalion. Although they gradually drifted back into all-band territory, something of the minimal coldness persists in the record’s bones. The first sound you hear is the blurp of a modular synth, which oscillates for a good minute before the first cloud of guitar colors the song’s edges. The perfectly named “chained to a cloud” lays out a loop, layers a few elements, and then lets a single lyric circle in the arrangement like one red sock in the dryer. At eight tracks, three of them mostly instrumental, the length feels purposeful and personal, like these songs are sketches from a journal Halstead and Goswell left open.

霍尔斯特德最初设想的一切都是活着的，作为乐队最短的一张唱片，在精神气质上更接近“Pygmalion”。尽管它们逐渐回到了全频率的领域，但在唱片的骨子里，仍然存在着某种最小的寒冷。你听到的第一个声音是模块合成器的隆隆声，它在吉他的第一片云为歌曲的边缘上色之前振荡了整整一分钟。这首名不副实的“chained to loud”设计了一个循环，把几个元素分层，然后让一个抒情的圆圈在这个循环中排列，就像烘干机里的一只红袜子。八首曲目，其中三首主要是器乐，专辑长度感觉有目的和私人化的，就像这些歌曲是霍尔斯特德和戈斯韦尔留下的一本日记的草稿。

Even the love songs feel lonelier, the landscape more unforgiving. A good Slowdive song has always felt like two lovers huddling together for warmth. But on everything is alive, the forces conspiring against the star-crossed lovers feel more menacing and specific. “Remember the first winter/The dark heart of everything/And the dog just laid down/You’ll cry for all of us,” Halstead murmurs on “andalucia plays.” The implication of a dead dog: Surely, this is a first for shoegaze, a genre predicated on recreating the terrifying teenaged conviction that all your strongest feelings would last forever. But this is what it means to be a survivor, even within music built on ephemerality: The longer you live, the further your central drama falls away from the frame, and the more attuned you become to the shifts happening at the corners, the markers of erosion. Everything is alive, yes, but only for a moment or two.

即使是情歌也感觉更孤独，形式也更无情。一首好的Slowdive歌曲总是感觉就像两个恋人拥抱在一起取暖。但一切都还活着，密谋反对这对不幸的恋人的力量让人感觉更有威胁性和针对性。“记住第一个冬天/一切的黑暗之心/狗刚刚躺下/你会为我们所有人哭泣，”Halstead在“andalucia plays”中喃喃自语。一只死狗的含义：当然，这是shoegaze的第一次，这种流派的前提是重现可怕的青少年观念，即你所有最强烈的感情都会永远持续下去。但这就是成为幸存者的含义，即使在建立在短暂的音乐中也是如此：你活得越久，你的中心戏剧离画面越远，你就越能适应角落里发生的转变，这是削弱的标志。一切都是活的，是的，但只有一两分钟。