Slowdive

Though commonly identified as a shoegaze band, Slowdive does indeed traffic in overdriven guitars and dreamily psychedelic sounds, but they also exhibit a broader set of inspirations -- folk-rock, dub, and ambient techno, to name a few -- than the majority of their '90s contemporaries. The band's distinctive sound, which combines large walls of effects-drenched guitars with funereal tempos and pristinely fragile vocals, has continually evolved from their early noisy singles like "Morningrise" and 1993's nearly poppy Souvlaki album to 1995's Pygmalion, a misunderstood ambient a...