Just for a Day is one of the weakest Slowdive releases. Read about the history of the band and you’ll find that frontman Neil Halstead lied to Creation Records about having enough songs for a full album and later went to record an entire album’s worth of songs with the band in one day. It shows in the quality of the final product. Slowdive at their best show that shoegaze can have a lot of variety and intricacy to the songs and make them all stand apart. Slowdive at their worst show the typical shortcomings of shoegaze: a monotone sound and mood and extremely basic songs coated in pretty noise, and even that aspect sounds the same on every song on Just for a Day.
The best aspect of Slowdive’s sound was always Simon Scott’s hypnotic, repetitive, tribal drumming. It’s here, but this album is so goddamned loud that it’s buried beneath the mix to the point of irrelevance. This is a boring album, but I’m nice to bands I like, so it gets a .5 rating bump. With all that said, Slowdive show their talents as songwriters and dream pop innovators on basically everything else they’ve released. Just not this. Just for a Day sounds like a typical Cocteau Twins album with some noise feedback. For fans only. The unconverted should stick with… anything else by Slowdive, really.
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