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Slowdive

Nov 24, 2024 By Matthew Berlyant Web Exclusive

After their triumphant show at Webster Hall last year (see review HERE), Slowdive came back to New York to play two nights at the much larger, brand new (well it hadn’t yet opened the last time they were in town) Brooklyn Paramount, a beautiful, historic, old theater owned by Long Island University (it’s on their Brooklyn campus). Despite the larger venue, this one, in its own way, felt just as intimate as the Webster Hall show. It’s the latest leg of their seemingly never-ending world tour for Everything is Alive, their second album since reforming in 2014 and one of 2023’s best, and it finds them at what is perhaps the very peak of their thirty-five year career.

The lighting was out of this world and the sound may have been the best I’ve ever heard at a show. It was, in a word, stunning, all the way from when they opened with “Avalyn” (from their very first, self-titled EP in 1990) to the very end of the encore, which consisted of two songs from their 1993 magnum opus second LP Souvlaki after they confidently opened said encore with “alife” from their most recent album. And during the main set, the vibe was the same, with the band effortlessly combining newer material from their two reunion albums (the other one being 2017’s Slowdive) with nineties classics like the aforementioned “Avalyn” alongside “Souvlaki Space Station,” “Catch the Breeze,” “When the Sun Hits,” and their epic cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair.”

It helps, of course, that their reunion albums are as good (if not better) than their nineties work, and that they clearly seem to be enjoying themselves onstage, enjoying popularity with younger listeners and old fans alike that they couldn’t have imagined in the nineties when they were half-filling small clubs here and being derided by the insufferably cruel British press of the time, all decades before TikTok, a burgeoning and ongoing shoegaze revival, and other factors changed their fortunes.

It should also be mentioned that songwriter/guitarist/vocalist Neil Halstead and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Rachel Goswell (whose harmonies are as exquisite as any male-female harmonies ever alongside Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris or John Doe and Exene Cervenka), guitarist Christian Savill, and bassist Nick Chaplin were joined by fill-in drummer Nicholas Willes (from Goswell’s other band Minor Victories) since regular drummer Simon Scott couldn’t make it this time around. Thankfully, Willes was INCREDIBLE, at times even echoing an update on Budgie (it’s not for nothing that they got their names from a Siouxsie and the Banshees song) that fit perfectly with their sound and material.

As Frankie Valli once sang long ago, “Oh what a night.”