Everything Is Alive

There’s not much on this album which will raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with their previous work, as it falls somewhere between the fuzzy glow of 1993’s Souvlaki and the dispassionate chill of its follow-up Pygmalion. But Everything Is Alive is joyful listen regardless, taking the cloud tunnel bliss of the best shoegaze and adding some pure pop pleasure. Cinema for the ears? More like dream visions for the soul.

Slowdive has outdone itself on its fifth full-length, Everything Is Alive, which elevates its pre-breakup work in ways that feel nearly unimaginable. Indeed, Slowdive in 2023 is capable of writing both the hands-down most affecting song of its career (“Andalucia Plays”) as well as its most in-your-face (“The Slab”), while also incorporating modular synths as foundational elements in its creative process for the first time (they’re the first notes you hear on opener “Shanty”).

This is the Slowdive you've been waiting for. [Oct 2023, p18]

everything is alive, prioritizes progression and refuses to stay stagnant. Sure, Slowdive glance back at their past every now and again, but it’s clear that their focus is fully set on the future.

Everything is alive may only contain eight tracks, but Slowdive manage to craft an album of profound beauty full of emotional heft, which encompasses sadness, joy, gratitude, and ultimately optimism.

Hard to categorise, and impossible to assess immediately, like all of Slowdive, everything is alive will ever blossom with time.

It gets a touch ploddy in the middle, but the motorik of Shanty and electric pulse of Chained To A Cloud channel sanguine sunshine. Thriving. [Oct 2023, p.85]

Everything Is Alive may not have a “Star Roving” kind of single tucked within, but it still hits the listener where it counts, deep within the tenth listen with the lights turned down low in late autumn. Don’t fret over any initial impressions of stasis. Everything is indeed alive.

Equally experimental and accessible, brimming over with aquatic atmosphere and pointed emotional feeling, and full of familiar joys and new surprises, everything is alive is the work of a group who are done reforming and have set their sights on brilliant evolution instead.

If there’s evidence of musical progression, meanwhile, it comes via an apparently new-found fixation Neil has with modular synths; he deploys them tastefully here, perhaps to most striking effect on ‘Chained to a Cloud’. In general, though, ‘everything is alive’ very much gives off the sense that the slower gestations lead to the richest rewards.

This second album of their second phase continues to do pretty much the same as they’ve ever done, but is all the lovelier for it.

Enchanting and illuminating, ‘everything is alive’ proves that Slowdive’s pulse is still beating strong.

These songs are indubitably vigorous and youthful. Moreover, there’s also a fleck of Slowdive's nostalgia and urgency spattered on them, like the golden sky at sunset, whose warm-coloured canvas quickly loses its treasured vibrance to nightly darkness.

everything is alive feels practically self-contained, like a Slowdive record blissfully unaware it is a Slowdive record, most likely for the better. Simultaneously, the fact that everything is alive could have been a very different album is hard to dismiss. The songs that contain explicit traces of this minimal electronic framework are easily the strongest cuts and, most importantly, feel like a productive midway point between “Slowdive Slowdiving” and whatever Pygmalion worshippers keep hoping for.

Everything Is Alive may not boast the lo-fi grit of Slowdive’s earlier work, but the band’s skill for scrupulous melodies is undiminished here. The album evolves Slowdive’s well-established sound with more electronic textures, creating a conceptual sonic landscape that buzzes with life.

While at first listen Everything Is Alive might seem plain and minimalist, its flavours can be savoured for a long time. A bit similar to a perennial flower regrowing every spring. Like wonders of life and death hiding beyond the seemingly impenetrable façade of routine and time, its sonic complexity lies beneath the surface.

Slowdive are scene vets that have seemingly perfected their sound, but still have enough drive to keep nudging it forward, one shimmering soundscape at a time.

Even the love songs feel lonelier, the landscape more unforgiving. A good Slowdive song has always felt like two lovers huddling together for warmth. But on everything is alive, the forces conspiring against the star-crossed lovers feel more menacing and specific.

Evocative rather than vivid in a way that evokes Faith-era Cure's greyscale atmospheres, Everything IS Alive is the sound of Slowdive still holding their impressive earthly form. [Oct 2023, p.85]