Blue Skied An' Clear

Shoegaze was named, dismissively, for the posture of its practitioners — standing onstage, looking at pedals, generating walls of guitar noise while audiences stood very still and felt things. Souvlaki is the album that earns that posture most completely, and “Blue Skied An’ Clear” is its quietly devastating center.

Slowdive were not the loudest of the shoegaze bands. My Bloody Valentine were louder. Ride were more aggressive. Slowdive’s distinction was emotional transparency — Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell’s voices buried in the guitar wash but still present, still reaching you through the noise with a directness that the density of the sound makes more rather than less affecting. You have to lean in to hear them, and leaning in is part of the experience.

“Blue Skied An’ Clear” opens with a guitar figure so gentle it barely disturbs the air, then layers accumulate — rhythm guitar, bass, effects, harmonics — building toward something that never quite arrives as a climax but sustains itself at a level of beauty that is its own kind of overwhelming. The tides-in, tides-out structure of the arrangement mirrors the lyrical content: bittersweet transcendence, the feeling of something ending on a clear day when the weather itself seems indifferent to your loss.

“Blue skied an’ clear / Won’t you let me disappear?”

The fact that “Alison” and “Dagger” are on the same album and are better known is a matter of circumstance rather than quality. “Blue Skied An’ Clear” is arguable the most emotionally resonant thing Slowdive ever recorded — Slowdive at their most achingly beautiful, which is saying something considerable.

The band broke up in 1995, dismissed by critics and ignored by everyone who wasn’t already devoted to them. They reunited in 2014 and released a new album in 2017 that was received as a triumph. Time corrected the critical record. This song was always this good.