Not Here Not Now (Re-mastered) [Bonus Tracks]

Album Review

Originally released in Germany in 2000 and then re-released in America six years later, Not Here Not Now doesn't so much suggest that it might be a shoegaze album as scream it — gently — from the rooftops. That Malory love Slowdive is utterly unsurprising — the cover art practically gives that much away to begin with — and rightly or wrongly the band operates fully in their shadow on this effort. Songs like "Just Be" and "Spring," with the gently sung vocal blend of male and female singer/guitarists (Joerg Koehler and Joerdis Marschner, respectively), the rich wash of serene digital-delay guitar parts, driving if understated rhythms, and the sense of envelopment verging on cotton-candy suffocation, pretty much clone the approach. It'll be catnip to anyone already enamored of the sound, though, and given that Slowdive's members have generally all left it behind them, there's nothing wrong with someone following in their wake. It certainly helps that the album starts with a crackerjack number in the instrumental "Falling" — not a cover of the Julee Cruise song, but a beautiful cascade of sound in any event, a stately, soaring-then-descending guitar line straight out of the Neil Halstead playbook over a gentle shuffling beat, at once perfectly simple and devastatingly effective as a powerful mood setter. It hits the nail on the head so perfectly that the rest of the album is almost an addendum, but a lovely one, from the gentle cymbal hits by drummer Joerg Jaekel that help open "Dany" to the intentionally hollow-sounding, weirdly compelling distortion opening of "Beauty." The first bonus American track, "Worry About Something," is pleasant enough, but the jaw-dropper is the unlisted track that follows — nothing less than a remarkable, stripped-down but still reverb-laden interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's poem "The Road Goes Ever On," as featured in his Middle Earth writings. It's arguably the biggest surprise on the disc, and as such makes for a perfect closer.