Slowdive

Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell had known each other since they were six years old, grown up together in Reading, learned guitar from the same teachers. By the time they were recording Souvlaki, they had also been in a relationship that had just ended, which meant Halstead was writing alone for the first time, working through something in the music that had previously been a shared process. He disappeared to a cottage in Wales at one point mid-session, leaving the rest of the band in a studio in Weston-super-Mare waiting for him. While they waited, they recorded what they called joke songs. Their label head Alan McGee heard those and told them all forty songs they had recorded were, in his estimation, not good enough.

Creation Records wanted something commercial. Brian Eno was contacted about taking over production. He declined to produce but agreed to appear, playing keyboards on two songs and co-writing "Sing." Two other tracks were made with his collaboration. Then the album was finished without a clear commercial direction and released anyway. Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, in a statement that crystallized a certain strand of critical contempt for shoegaze at the time, told an interviewer he hated Slowdive more than Hitler. The album peaked at number 51 in the UK.

Time has been extremely kind to Souvlaki. The sounds it made, guitars dissolved in reverb and delay until they stop being guitars and start being weather, Goswell and Halstead trading vocals back and forth like two temperatures of the same breeze, have come to define what the word "dreamy" means when applied to music. Put it on late at night with the lights low and understand why this album accrued the following it did.