Slowdive – Catch The Breeze

 

Slowdive – Catch The Breeze

By

Jesse E. Mullen

Compilation albums are a tricky business. When done right, they can distill a band’s entire catalog down to a disc or two. Too often however, they fail to include all the right tracks and fans are better off buying the albums from which they came.

I rarely review compilations for two reasons. Reason one is that they aren’t albums in the purest sense. The material on them doesn’t come from uniform sessions and the songs weren’t originally intended to be heard in that context.

The second reason is that they often don’t include enough new material to be enticing. Obviously, there are exceptions – The Who’s Odds and Sods, Suede’s Sci-Fi Lullabies, The Smiths’ Hatful of Hollow – but these are few and far between.

So, I purchased Slowdive’s Catch The Breeze anthology with a degree of skepticism. Fortunately, it leans much closer to the classic anthologies of yore than a simple “best of” compilation.

All the big hits are here – “Slowdive,” “Catch The Breeze,” “Alison,” “When The Sun Hits” – but there are also many surprises. The entire Slowdive and Holding Our Breath EPs are included here – both long out of print and highly expensive – and it also included another special surprise.

Slowdive’s 1995 then-swansong Pygmalion was released in extremely limited quantities in the UK by Creation, before being deleted from the label’s catalog. Consequently, the album became quite expensive on eBay.

Catch The Breeze fixes this up to a point. Five of the album’s nine tracks are included here. As this was before Pygmalion had been re-released, it helped the album gain a cult following amongst shoegazing fans.

Furthermore, another featured track – “So Tired” – was incredibly rare in America, having only featured on the 1993 import EP Outside Your Room. However, unlike other tracks from this era, it was not featured on the 1994 US release of the band’s masterpiece Souvlaki.

But how does all this music sound? Well, it’s dreamy shoegazing with walls of guitars by Neil Halstead and Christian Savill, angelic vocals from Rachel Goswell, and a great rhythm section in bassist Nick Chaplin and drummer Simon Scott (later Ian McCutcheon on the Pygmalion tracks; Scott left before Slowdive’s 1994 North American tour.)

Perhaps the song which best exemplifies the Slowdive sound is “Shine.” Dreamy waves of melancholy, washed-out electric guitars and Goswell’s most soothing vocals to date introduce the track in gorgeous fashion. Unlike most conventional rock songs however, very little changes over the course of the five-minute duration. Instead, “Shine” functions as a sort of shoegazing meditation.

The song’s music video is equally enchanting. Shot in 1991, it shows the band – looking very young, indeed – fooling around at the beach over the course of a day, with time-lapse transitions into nighttime. With the band all in their early 50s, the video now reads as a poignant meditation on youth, deepening the audio/visual experience.

Overall, props must be given to Sanctuary Records and Slowdive in picking the best – and rarest – tracks for preservation in anthology form. While compilations rarely take advantage of the source material, Catch The Breeze serves as a time capsule to the early ‘90s Thames Valley sound.

Sanctuary/2004