music moots with Mieke ("Alison" by Slowdive)

We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.

Today we have Mieke! I actually featured Mieke's song "when bambi found her mother" in a previous Music Moots when it was recommended by midnight dive, and in a wonderful turn of events, I got to get a recommendation from Mieke herself after a delightful DM exchange. When social media is good...it's really good...

The New Zealand musician has been dropping some heater singles this year, including the woozy "kissing maggots" and the dreamily droning "nuclear," which sounds like someone drilling through a solid wall of granite with a shimmering rainbow-colored laser. I also have to shout out Mieke's wonderful video aesthetic, which creates a charmingly retro vision of the internet that has just a touch of creepiness beneath the cuteness.

Mieke suggested "Alison" by Slowdive, a perfectly aligned recommendation, and not just because its HEAVY LIGHTNESS can be found refracted in the new Mieke tunes I mentioned. After seeing Slowdive play Just Like Heaven, I've had it on my music blogger to-do list to listen to their studio output, so this was a great excuse to get that task all done and dusted.

Slowdive were proper British early 1990s shoegazers, and "Alison" is the first song on Souvlaki, the band's 1993 sophomore album. Apparently Souvlaki was not really a commercial or critical success in its time, but it's now one of those Retrospective Classics some of us know and love. (If I have any kind of critical ethos as a music writer, it's making a point of circumventing the "unappreciated, or even hated, in their time" label and trying to crack the music that we will all think is good later, now. This is why I'm ultimately encouraging of artists like Benson Boone.)

That Slowdive JLH set was perfect. I enjoyed the set on the ground in a reclined position, leaning and loafing at my ease, letting the sludgy-shimmery tones flow through me. Definitely a situation where the louder the music is, the better. To the left of our crew was a man laid out flat in a sand trap (the festival was kind of in the middle of a golf course), alone and dead asleep. After determining he was alive, we let him chill. Halfway through the set, he woke up, shook off the sand, leaned over and address my husband, who was closest: "I'm gonna ask you a stupid question…is this Slowdive?" It totally was.

I did not have a huge stack of stadium speakers with which to listen to "Alison" to try to recreate the festival experience, but for this blog's purpose, I played it at an immersive volume within noise-canceling headphones. There is something quite physical that happens when exposed to such incandescent guitar tones and extended vocal exhalations. A sound bath of reverb and distortion that eases the shoulders and slows the breathing. Mieke said she enjoys listening to the song the most "on a night drive where I'm alone in the car." Who has two hands (positioned at 10 and 2) and loves a night drive? Me!! "Alison" sounds a bit like being on a isolated road late at night, then seeing headlights appear as you veer around a bend or reach the peak of a little hill—beams of reassurance in the dark, you're not totally alone.

Thank you Mieke! She's dropping a new album Frau Eva soon—below is her short film for the album, and here's her link aggregation.

Thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend.