Slowdive

Slowdive ... now sound powerful, confident, the band they always wanted to be.

Like most of the best reunion albums, this one plays like the band not just wanted to make it, but needed to, and took its time doing it. The resulting album is fantastic and, despite being so deliberate, feels fresh and immediate throughout.

“Slowdive” teaches us some valuable lessons. Never write off musicians just because they were in a momentarily hip genre twenty-two years ago. Long songs can hold your attention if you let them.

This is an album comfortably on a par with the work of most of the younger artists they’ve influenced; compelling proof that the original shoegazers have stood the test of time remarkably well.

Slowdive is a surprisingly joyously return to the fray.

The gauzy, indistinct vocals of Neil Halsted and Rachel Goswell continue to weave their shoey magic.

Shoegaze is rarely affiliated with overwrought emotion, and yet it’s difficult not to feel moved by the expanse of the group’s oceanic comeback.

Returning to Slowdive’s latest album is like plunging back into the pool after a long hot bake in the sun.

Rather than relying on what they knew to be “shoegaze”, a genre very firmly rooted in time and place, they’ve applied this newly transformed sound to their existing skillset.

The band’s new, self-titled album sees them ageing gracefully, but not without tweaks, even if reinvention is too strong a word.

On Slowdive there are moments when they create this inter-galactic grace as well as they ever have, but sometimes their desire to reinstate their ethereal prowess can seem a little prescriptive.

This is one of the strongest comeback albums in recent memories. Let's hope they stick around for a while longer this time around!

Where revivals can be overwhelmingly about sad attempts to relive the past, this one is a tapping into a unique wellspring, and that is a very wonderful thing.

Slowdive, the band’s first album in 22 years, is here, and it’s good in that pleasingly familiar way. The record does not pick up where Pygmalion left off. If anything, it sounds as though it could have been recorded in 1993.

Slowdive is not a quantum-leap record, nor does it slavishly replicate past successes. Rather it’s another collection of thoughtfully written songs, filled with evident joy for the band’s reformation.

It will comfort fans of the band, both those who loved them at the time and those who have discovered them in the intervening years, by being very much a Slowdive album. One that feels modern enough, but also very classic at the same time.

The laconically titled Slowdive adapts to what Slowdive are capable of sounding in 2017: there’s no need to reinvent because doing that once is enough, so why not apply what they know best and try to adapt to a different, more current environment.

Rightly dominating the mix here are the effects-laden layers of guitar which shimmer, sigh and caress body and soul. Along with the melodic, melancholic vocal mumblings and minimalist drum beats, the overall atmosphere is that of a hazy, underwater dream.

Slowdive's first album in over two decades finds the band's once heavenly wall of sound turning anemic.

There's too little oomph to suggest they'll bother the scorers.