Released on 6 February 1995 "Pygmalion" was the third studio album by English rock band Slowdive, it was the band's final album before their disbandment in 1995 and
later reformation in 2014, and their only album with Ian McCutcheon, who
had replaced Simon Scott on drums.
The UK shoegaze legends were already critically drubbed in their own time—a Melody Maker reviewer infamously wrote “would rather drown choking in a bath full of porridge than ever listen to their 1993 album Souvlaki again”—but rather than capitulate to Britpop's fake Beatlemania, Slowdive went further out to sea on Pygmalion.
Pygmalion is a significant departure from the shoegaze style that Slowdive had established in their previous two studio albums, Just for a Day (1991) and Souvlaki (1993). The album features a more experimental sound tilted towards ambient electronic music, with sparse, atmospheric arrangements. A sort of ambient pop dreams stylistically closer to post-rock according a Pitchfork's music journalist another point of view was that Pygmalion
sounded as a shoegaze album, although not in the conventional sense of the
style, noting that at points the album forgoes conventional percussion,
or percussion in general.
With the exception of the lyrics for the songs "Miranda" and "Visions of LA", which were written by Rachel Goswell, Pygmalion was composed by Neil Halstead. Several songs on the album reflect Halstead's experimentation with digital technology and techniques such as looping and reverb. This was born out of his then-increasing fascination with electronica and dance music.
It was a time when grunge and then Britpop dominated the music press and defined the
increasingly corporate 'indie' scene, Slowdive were marked for death as
the epitome of Home Counties, middle class, namby-pamby aural wallpaper,
with Richey Edwards of the Manics professing to "hate Slowdive more than Hitler." Cool
Britannia was getting ready to swing, and Slowdive were most definitely
not invited.
There was a sort of irony with own label,
Creation, which had done much to create this toxic environment for the
band. They may have fired the shoegaze Ride’s Nowhere had given Creation their first top 20 album – but unfortunately Alan McGee was forever keen to break out of the indie ghetto and it was the signing of Oasis in 1993 that changed
everything. From being a label that had nurtured all manner of artful,
and often rather fey, talent in its early days, Creation became the
cheerleader for a nostalgic brand of brash, unit-shifting guitar pop
that had little truck with notions of subtlety or experimentation.
McGee had evidently soon tired of Slowdive – the fact they were
regularly ridiculed in the press can’t have endeared them to a man
constantly chasing the next big, or at the very least, cool thing. Slowdive were one of the first guitar bands to successfully integrate ambient techno into their sound on the 5EP.
But Creation’s red-rimmed eyes were now focused exclusively on the
charts, and McGee told Slowdive that their next LP had to be much more
pop…Pygmalion is most definitely not a pop record. Creation sat on
the album for almost a year before putting it out, then dropped the band
a week after its release. Given the UK’s general antipathy towards
them, it’s perhaps not a surprise that Slowdive ceased to exist soon
after.
Pygmalion is a sort of eclectic record but instead of pursuing a chilled techno sound, they went in
the opposite direction, stripping back their wall of noise to reveal
its shimmering, ghostly outline underneath. In doing so, they created a
minimalist post rock masterpiece that may have struggled to be heard in
1995 but sounds today like a visionary blueprint for
generations of bands to come.
Ten-minute opening track "Rutti" acts as a mission statement for the
whole album. It starts with just a soft downstroke of guitar, answered a
moment later by a few murmured notes. The atmosphere is hushed,
unhurried, contemplative. The idea of space is absolutely key to Pygmalion. A popular
early metaphor used to describe the effects-drenched music of the
shoegaze bands was a "cathedral of sound". "Crazy For You" comes swathed in the type of sonic derangement
suggested by its title, the reverb on Halstead’s voice now sounding
vaguely threatening as he repeats the words over and over, feedback
looming in and out of the mix. Yet at the heart of the song is another
simple guitar figure, looped endlessly and without interruption,
twinkling madly in the background. Y
"Miranda" exemplifies Pygmalion’s other main vibe, that of an
eerie dislocation, the listener again pulled away from the world, but
this time into a disquieting nether zone. Against a woozy pattern of
circular picking, Rachel Goswell’s voice is beatific but bleary, her
words reverbed beyond comprehension as a tremulous siren calls down from
high above. "Trellisaze" exists even further out in some strange dub limbo,
eccentrically propelled by the manipulated ticking of a grandfather
clock
Nowadays, the album it seems more than a
little harsh that such a luminous and perfectly-formed album was so
resolutely dismissed on its release. But the fact that it didn’t fit
with the prevailing narrative of the times is captured in John Harris's NME review, where, despite conceding that "large swathes of Pygmalion are endowed with a real allure," he describes the album as "career
suicide" because "disc jockeys and TV programmers will yelp, "I can't do
anything with this"
However, Pygmalion didn’t completely sink without trace on its
initial release. It’s
likely that Pygmalion’s calm, meditative melodicism had an impact
on the early sound of both these bands, and in doing so helped gently
kick-start the second wave of guitar-oriented post rock. And shoegaze
itself, long free of the negative connotations previously attached to
it, has again become a legitimate genre and source of inspiration, with
everybody from Sigur Rós to Tame Impala trying on its sonic aesthetic.
Much to their surprise, it’s even enabled Slowdive to reform, playing to
new generations of fans, many of whom weren’t even born when the band
were initially active.
Basically, Pygmalion is an album that was simply out of time. But It doesn’t
feel dated. It’s for what comes after the end of history, the period of
uncertainty, anger and despair that we’re currently trying to deal with.
It offers solace and a space for reflection in a fractious,
hyper-accelerated world. After all, it’s little wonder if our desire to
‘lose today’ doesn’t sometimes become overwhelming. This
majestic record became a cult touchstone for its ambient detours and
post-rock experiments. Nothing else sounds quite like it, and Slowdive
themselves fell silent for years afterward, save for side projects, only
to finally reemerge with 2017’s triumphant, self-titled reunion album.
Back in the day "Pygmalion" was largely overlooked by contemporary music
critics, with competing musical trends and the radically different style
of the album being main factors according to journalist Kieron Tyler;
with the Britpop
genre at the height of its popularity, Slowdive were seen as
"past-their-sell-by-date shoegazers" by a music press who were more
interested in covering the Britpop scene, but things got changed since, now it's a stylistic masterpiece, an epic album, the Halstead and Goswell's masterpiece".
Pygmalion Track List:
1. Rutti
2. Crazy For You
3. Miranda
4. Trellisaze
5. Cello
6. J's Heaven
7. Vision Of LA
8. Blue Skied And Clear
9. All Of Us
