It’s Comeback Day and we’re feeling “ehhh…?” about it!
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[5.44]
Micha Cavaseno: The sound of your older relative trying to tell you about their band back in the day, back before they had kids and expectation, this sounds enough like old Slowdive, but more or less like Slowdive trying to say they still got it. And I don’t particularly like Slowdive in any incarnation so maybe they do.
[4]
Ryo Miyauchi: If Souvlaki was the music for a heart finally winning the prize, and Pygmalion shared the bottomless sensation of losing it all, Slowdive gets back on the search for that old spark again with “Star Roving.” They don’t bring any high highs or low lows, just a steady riff strumming in a straight line. The zero-gravity section in the middle offers a peaceful rest, but its brief length reminds you got to keep it going.
[6]
Alfred Soto: A pleasant simulacrum of the desperately heady commotion that kept them in the second tier of shoegaze acts. I wish them luck on the festival circuit and fondest wishes that their equipment doesn’t short when it rains.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: Shoegaze of the heavy-guitar variety, with a soupçon of “Teenage Riot” for good measure.
[7]
Will Adams: Immersive shoegaze that, like The Raveonettes’ “Recharge and Revolt,” asks little more than for you to submerge yourself in its sunstreaked haze and coast along for its 5+ minutes.
[7]
Mo Kim: Me and AJ two minutes into our sightread listen: “Ugh, there’s five minutes of this?”
[3]
Mark Sinker: The only thing that rescued me at the time from sinking into shoegaze like a warm toxic bath was having to write about other kinds of music for a living, and now it’s decades later and the suds are dirtygrey and the water’s very cold.
[5]
David Sheffieck: The string of college- and alternative-rock reunions over the past decade and change has mostly been an embarrassment artistically: I completely support their right to make some cash as nostalgia acts, but their attempts at new music have diminished their legacies more than anything else. Slowdive may have had a leg up, given that the band members largely kept working together in their time “apart” and that their sound never quite broke into the mainstream to begin with so it still seems completely theirs, but it’s still kinda amazing how good “Star Roving” is. Yes, the song picks up as though Pygmalion never happened, but there’s enough drive and hooks and beauty to be found here that it mostly doesn’t matter. This sounds vital in a way most reunions can only dream of.
[8]
Jonathan Bradley: Three minutes in and Slowdive has run out of melodic tricks to unearth from their clods of guitar; unfortunately, there’s still two minutes on the clock to run down. Shoegaze needs a sound in which one can get lost, and rather than intricacy, “Star Roving” — a title that enacts its genre conventions as dutifully as the arrangement — arrives merely at viscosity.
[4]