Pygmalion
by Slowdive

From HoldenM TOP 100 COMMENTER 05/25/2015 01:02 | #142356 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

To me, this is so clearly Slowdive's masterpiece. It's potent, and has a timelessness to it. If I had heard this, and someone had told me it came out today, I could totally believe that. There are albums from ten years ago that don't hold up as well as this breezy, haunting collection of songs.

While nearly all Slowdive fans adore the previous LP Souvlaki, this next album Pygmalion is where fans seem to find no easy middle ground. Pygmalion is either the fan's favorite or is (mistakenly) considered a totally failed album, such is its departure from the group's previous work. Their record label (Creation) delayed the record's release and promptly dumped the group from the roster immediately after finally releasing it. (For me it is my favorite.)

Whereas their previous work used dozens (hundreds?) of guitar effects pedals, there the effects are more often saved for experimental vocal treatments, particularly Rachel Goswell's. The record opens with a strummed guitar chord slowy unfolding into a ten-minute opus that feels like an orbit. And with each next song, the mood gets hazier and more out of focus, eventually the tide turns and wraps back into focus by the final song. You may drift in and out of your body or merge with your couch. What a masterpiece.

From Komorebi-D 12/26/2016 06:31 | #181010 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

If you're coming off Souvlaki, Just For A Day or both, don't be expecting Pygmalion to keep its nose to the grindstone. This isn't so much a shoegaze album as it is a Post-Rock and an ambient one. Once you get past Crazy For You, the whole paradigm shifts and shit goes full Spiderland meets 80's Eno or Aphex Twin. If you're a lover of Ambient, Post-Rock and/or Shoegaze albums - just like me - you'll probably love this album. It acts as an almost frightening document to the year shoegaze was considered to be a dying art (the very same Pygmalion was released), as well as an brilliant example (if not an underrated one) of post-rock pre-F# A# Infinity.

In terms of Slwodive's body of work itself; I'd have to rank this in second place.

From johnner TOP 100 COMMENTER 02/06/2014 15:59 | #102378 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

I bought this lp when it came out. I thought it was great but no one else wanted to know - glad it's been reappraised and now seen to be the masterpiece it always was.

From Cargusbralem 06/14/2019 00:55 | #237502 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

It is difficult to make a comparison between this and Souvlaki. Souvlaki is a standard collection of great shoegaze songs, while the enigmatic Pygmalion focuses more on creating haunting, and very spacy soundscapes with an even denser reverb effect on everything most of the time. It's like a black hole swallowed Souvlaki (space station?) and here we are on another dimension, lost in Pygmalion. Luckily, the last couple of tracks offer us a ticket back home, just when we thought our oxygen tanks were depleted.

Anyway that's what I felt while listening to this album, and I'm giving it a 7 (good album).