slowdive: classic or dud?

Slowdive is head and shoulders above almost all other shoegazer bands, though maybe just a head above medicine, and a head and half a shoulder above MBV.

With that, this thread revive is officially not Ned friendly.

well, i'd say that MBV is a good torso and genitals above the next best shoegaze band.

Then Ride be just below the sack?

OK, you and sense just clearly parted company a long time ago.

x-post

I went through a huge shoegaze phase, and discovered that most of these jokers are terrible-- Ride included.

You know who I'm gonna ask first, when it come to an opinion on what the best shoegaze bands are?

Someone who ~doesn't like shoegaze~

Yup, that'll work.

was anyone here saying they were entitled to a slowdive reunion, or any other reunion? has anyone actually ever felt entitled to that kind of thing? is there a possible scenario where slowdive are in any way being forced to do this, or is it more likely that they want some $$? and is anyone here being forced to go watch them cash in on nostalgia for a few shows, other than professional music critics who are tasked to attend by their bosses?

just let them reunite and suck! jeezus

for 2 years i sat there and pretended shit like pale saints, ride, swervedriver, and chapterhouse wasn't total crap, but eventually i saw the light. xp

just let them reunite and suck! jeezus

Hey, stop FORCING Slowdive to reunite, already!

i work hard, i pay my taxes, i love my family ... i deserve a slowdive reunion!

http://i46.tinypic.com/1zo9kdi.jpg

"alright, listen here Neil Halstead. you're going to play Catch the Breeze, you're going to play more transcendentally than you've ever played, and you're going to like it, you hear me??"

^would see that show

play machine gun or you get a machine gun in your face, halstead.

just let them reunite and suck! jeezus

There would be other kinds of protests as a result.

hahahaha

well it is true that i haven't considered the second-order consequences of a reunion

Neighbors say the masked gunman was a normal guy that just loved his family. "Times are tough, but sometimes when you can't get the guitar bliss you feel like you earned, especially in this economy, well I guess some people just snap"

Obama stole my grandma's Slowdive

> shit like pale saints

steady...

float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, shit like pale saints..

See this is why I'm wary of the taste of people who say their favourite showgaze band / the only good shoegaze band is Slowdive.

And let me reiterate, I don't dislike Slowdive! I own several of their albums!

It's just that when people who don't really like shoegaze slag off shoegaze, all those negative qualities they use to slag it off - droney, boring, repetitive, mindless prettiness, sexless, middle class. Slowdive are, like, the utter epitome of those qualities. They are quite quintessential of a view of shoegaze that 1) really quite annoys me and 2) doesn't represent anything of ~what I loved~ about shoegaze.

So when someone tells me that Slowdive were the best shoegaze band, I just think "you are looking for a very different thing in music than I am."

Also, if you are over the age of 15 and ~pretend to like~ any kind of music, you really are a tosser.

Yeah, but who here's doing that?

hmmm I'm way over 15 and I think to this day Slowdive is still, as back then, my favorite "shoegaze" band. I don't see how they epitomize "droney, boring, repetitive, mindless prettiness, sexless, middle class" - for me Souvlaki is the opposite of all that.

for 2 years i sat there and pretended shit like pale saints, ride, swervedriver, and chapterhouse wasn't total crap, but eventually i saw the light. xp

― Poliopolice, Thursday, August 30, 2012 8:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I took that to mean "tried to convince myself" which is fairly different I think. tbf I do not claim to have a window into the soul of Poliopolice

When I see people use a word - like "pretending" - I tend to think that they mean what they say, or they would have phrased it differently.

But I have this argument every time we talk about Shoegaze. That if someone thinks that Slowdive are the ~pinnacle of shoegaze~ and bands like Pale Saints are "crap" - that person is clearly looking for something so different in music than what I loved about shoegaze that it would be pointless for me to use their tastes as reference for anything meaningful to me.

You mean you find Pales Saints are any less pretty, sexless and middle class? hmmmm...

They are less *mindlessly* pretty - i.e. the prettiness in their music has a purpose, and is usually used as a counterpoint to psychedelic noise of confusion. They are definitely less sexless (rowr) and middle class I don't know about, but they were from Leeds instead of the Thames Valley so the Northern perspective was more interesting than yet another OxfordReadingLondon band.

Yes, yes, I'm being facetious, but their music had a scrappy spikiness amidst all the prettiness that I found texturally just much more interesting.

Also Spoonfed Hybrid >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Mojave 3.

Glad to see someone defending Pale Saints, a great band. I love the little motto on their "Flesh balloon" EP which read "Scene but not herd". So many great aspects to them - their roots in C86 indie (their first demo was reviewed in the short lived indie "Underground" mag from 87), the way they merged dreamy with spiky, the layers of sounds, Ian Masters' slightly skewed basslines, and Spoonfed Hybrid is one of my favourite albums ever. As shoegazing was at its height in 91 they really weren't there, their Northern slant meant they weren't seen to be with the Ride / Slowdive / Chapterhouse crowd. Certainly the inkies at the time never mentioned them in the same breath as the other "Scene that celebrates itself" bands.

Oh and pinnacle of shoegaze = Moose's first two EPs, imho. Hard to believe that 20 years after the fact people are still arguing about what shoegazing is / was.

Pale Saints toured with and had intra-band links to Lush! Hence their STCI connection. But Lush are another band who have been unfortunately and unfairly pushed down the shoegaze canon.

As shoegazing was at its height in 91 they really weren't there, their Northern slant meant they weren't seen to be with the Ride / Slowdive / Chapterhouse crowd. Certainly the inkies at the time never mentioned them in the same breath as the other "Scene that celebrates itself" bands

The way I recall it, it was Ride - Ride EP, Lush - Mad Love EP, and Pale Saints - The Comforts of Madness all released in quick succession at the start of 1990 and shown on Snub TV and those bands were often talked about together. The rest came later.

Don't you think Poliopolice was using the word "pretending" in hindsight? Like now that he realized he is very over those bands and his change of heart makes him feel like he was fooling himself the whole time. Just a guess. I mean when I hear people say pretend in that context they generally aren't letting you in to some conscious poseuring they'd participated in at some point.

yeah, you're taking it too literally. by the time i was into this stuff, the whole shoegaze thing was over by nearly a decade-- therefore, not en vogue at all. when i said 'pretend', it's not that i was trying to attach myself to a scene (because there was none by then), but that i was trying hard to appreciate that which was described to me as great examples of that genre after having gotten heavily into MBV and Medicine first. for that reason, i wanted to like Ride and Pale Saints so much, until i discovered, after much effort and money wasted, that there was really not much depth or staying power to most of them; they were just bands whose names were repeated, perhaps because there simply weren't that many notable names in the genre to begin with.

so does this mean, as you charge, that i don't like really shoegaze because i think the vast majority of bands in that genre were kind of bad, and thus i'm a shoegaze poseur and have no credibility? i'm willing to concede that some people might think that, but as least i can honestly say that i spent an extended period exploring the genre thoroughly, and drew my own conclusion that most of it really isn't that good. that's just my opinion; no one has to agree with it!

No, what I'm trying to get through to you is that "I don't like this" is not the same as "this is bad."

Saying "this band has no staying power" when there are people ITT who still get those records out occasionally, 20 years later, is just a tad of an arrogant thing to say. It's fine for you to not like it. But you don't get to redefine the boundaries of a genre that was established 20 years ago, just to suit your particular tastes.

No, what I'm trying to get through to you is that "I don't like this" is not the same as "this is bad."

Yes it is. When someone says "this is bad", it is implicit that what they are really saying is "I don't like this." All opinions are relative.

Did I miss something? When did Poliopolice try to change everyone's opinion about shoegaze? Is he also the one forcing Slowdive to reunite? Poliopolice, just let shoegaze be!

But seriously he is just talking about his own opinions on shoegaze. As much as I disagree about the horrible things he says about Swervedriver!

Shoegaze isn't really a genre tho

Yes it is. When someone says "this is bad", it is implicit that what they are really saying is "I don't like this." All opinions are relative.

It's like squares and rectangles. All squares are rectangles---not all rectangles are squares.

If you say, "This is bad," then you are always saying, "I don't like this." (Although, I would argue against that.)

However, when you say, "I don't like this," you aren't always saying, "This is bad."

Katy Perry is bad = I don't like Katy Perry.

I don't like Led Zeppelin /= Led Zeppelin is bad.

...I'm just arguing to argue.

droney = good thing, boring = good thing, repetitive = good thing, mindless prettiness = good thing, sexless = good thing, middle class = pretty meaningless thing in relation to music

At this point I would pay good money to see see slowdive play a full reunion set consisting entirely of them arguing about taste and the semantics of not liking things. And I would pay even more if I knew Neil halstead didn't want to do it.

Like

A like is like a like

At this point I would pay good money to see see slowdive play a full reunion set consisting entirely of them arguing about taste and the semantics of not liking things. And I would pay even more if I knew Neil halstead didn't want to do it.

"Hi, we're Slowdive. We really don't want to play this show, so here's Pygmalion in its entirety."

I think you missed a joke somewhere down the line.

> The way I recall it, it was Ride - Ride EP, Lush - Mad Love EP, and Pale Saints - The Comforts of Madness all released in quick succession at the start of 1990 and shown on Snub TV and those bands were often talked about together. The rest came later.

Ride and Pale Saints played together (along with Teenage Fanclub and Pastels) at ULU (17 nov '89) just before those first eps and toured together afterwards (i think) to the point where ride covered Sight Of You on their first peel session (feb 1990)

but this:

"Also Spoonfed Hybrid >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Mojave 3."

is a pile of wrong 8)

No, what I'm trying to get through to you is that "I don't like this" is not the same as "this is bad."

I don't disagree with you-- and honestly i'm finding it a little perplexing that you think i'm trying to tag all the wikipedia articles for Pale Saints and Swervedriver with the category "Objectively Bad Artists from the 90s." it's just an opinion; you are free to disagree, just as all people are free to disagree about anything. i'm fine with admitting that my opinion on anything is not the be-all-end-all, and that i may have wrongly maligned Chapterhouse. :)

Nevertheless, I think it's only fair to point out that your line of argument would also hold that guys like Thomas Kinkade are good artists-- it's just that people who don't like Kinkade don't like that kind of art. I'm actually quite fine with this; I consider art completely subjective. Even if 100% people think it's terrible, it's still subjective to me because there's no objective way to measure artistic quality. I've actually had people try to convince me that Thomas Kinkade is objectively bad; i find this proposition ridiculous.