Slowdive
National Stadium, Dublin
★★★★☆
The 1990s are remembered for grunge, rave and Britpop – but the early years of the decade also heralded a musical revolution of a different shade. This was the heyday of “shoegaze”, a genre involving introverted singers and guitars exploding like a dying sun in a Kubrick film. Here was heavy metal for wallflowers, cathartic onslaughts for people who’d rather hide in a cupboard than exchange small talk with strangers.
The effect is wonderfully recreated as one of the scene’s luminaries, Slowdive, play their first Dublin show. But if 30 years coming, the concert is no nostalgia orgy. Having reformed in 2014, Slowdive have put out two fantastic new albums. These take the dewy-eyed vulnerability of their 1990s phase and stir in oodles of middle age-ennui.
It’s an irresistible blend of old and new – the time-worn and the painfully raw. Blast off is achieved as the five-piece, framed by still lighting and fronted by singer-guitarists Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead, plunge into Shanty, from new LP, Everything Is Alive.
Something modern is followed by somehow venerable and vulnerable. The 1990s come swooping through on a cosmically eerie Souvlaki Space Station – released as their label, Creation, was morphing from indie powerhouse to the ladrock fountainhead that gave the world Oasis (Slowdive left soon afterwards).
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[ Slowdive: Everything Is Alive – Hope, optimism and gorgeously pitched songsOpens in new window ]
Shoegaze will be forever synonymous with Anglo-Celtic quartet My Bloody Valentine, led by Dubliner Kevin Shields. He has a skill set and backstory quite distinct from that of Slowdive. Goswell and company never cut their teeth in a punk band with the shoeless regent of raggle-taggle Liam Ó Maonlaí, for one thing. But it’s the sheer Englishness of Slowdive, from the Thames Valley near Reading, that is perhaps their most striking calling hard: a mix of melancholy, mundanity and quiet despair, which blossoms on songs such as Slomo and oldie Alison.
They play within themselves for most of the evening. Just once do they truly cut loose, on a cover of Syd Barrett’s Golden Hair. Arriving just before the encore it finishes with lights dimming, guitars going off like napalm. For a moment, beauty gives way to terror, a performance strewn with emotional bombshells delivering a detonation that makes your ears ring and head spin.
