By [Author Name]
Date: October 2023
Label: Dead Oceans
Rating: 9/10
Beneath the beautiful noise, Everything Is Alive is profoundly sad. The pandemic context is unavoidable. During the writing process, the band members lost parents. They faced their own mortality. Yet, the album is not depressive; it is resigned—in the best sense of the word.
Resignation here is not giving up. It is accepting that loss is part of the architecture of life. As Halstead told The Guardian, “You get to a certain age and you realize everything is fragile. The album is about trying to enjoy the fragility instead of fearing it.”
The title track (lyrically) asserts that a dead leaf on the ground is still alive as soil. A memory is alive as long as it is recalled. A band is alive as long as it plays. Everything Is Alive is a triumphant surrender to transience.
The album closes with "everyone knows," a six-and-a-half-minute epic that refuses to fade quietly. Starting as a lonely piano ballad—imagine Nick Drake dropped into a cathedral—it slowly accretes mass. By the four-minute mark, the distortion swallows the melody whole, only to spit it out again, clean and pure, as the final chords ring out.
It is a classic Slowdive tactic, but it lands with more force because of the journey. We have listened through the darkness to get here.
Where early Slowdive (think Souvlaki) was drenched in reverb and teenage melancholy, everything is alive feels like middle-aged reflection—still beautiful, but with more space and grit. Key characteristics:
Musically, everything is alive is the sound of a band finally comfortable in their own skin, willing to break the rules of the genre they helped define.
The album opens with "shanty" —a misleading title. There are no sea shanty harmonies here. Instead, we are plunged into a skeletal drum loop and a pulsing, almost Neu!-like motorik beat. It is perhaps the most aggressive track Slowdive has recorded since Just for a Day. The guitars don't just shimmer; they scrape and claw. Halstead’s vocal melody twists around a dark chord progression, setting a tone that the album will subvert for the next 40 minutes.
Then comes "prayer remembered." This is the Slowdive of the Pygmalion era, but warmer. Built around a hypnotic, finger-picked acoustic guitar and Rachel Goswell’s angelic coo, the song feels like walking through a forest after a forest fire. The electronics (courtesy of Simon Scott) bubble beneath the surface like subterranean rivers. When the distortion finally hits midway through, it isn’t a crash; it’s a sunrise.
