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.
