Slide Away

The Verve's "Slide Away," from 1993's *A Storm in Heaven*, captures the band before their Britpop-era anthems, still steeped in swirling psychedelic shoegaze. Nick McCabe's guitar is the star — liquid, echo-drenched, bending into long reverberant arcs that seem to dissolve at the edges — while the rhythm section locks into a hypnotic, almost krautrock pulse that lets the song expand outward rather than march toward a chorus. Richard Ashcroft's vocal floats above it all, more incantation than melody, his words half-buried in the mix as texture. The lyric gestures at transcendence and escape, "slide away" functioning as both an invitation to dissolve into sensation and a hint of romantic or chemical drift. There's a narcotic warmth to the whole thing, a sense of being suspended mid-air. This is headphone music for altered states and long night drives, the work of a young band more interested in atmosphere and ascension than in the radio-ready songcraft they'd later master on "Bittersweet Symphony." For listeners tracing the lineage from My Bloody Valentine to late-'90s anthemic rock, it's an essential, gorgeously unmoored document of a band learning to levitate.