Sometime in the mid ’90s, I discovered Slowdive through Brendon Macaraeg’s long-defunct Dreampop webzine, where he described the shoegaze quintet’s music using womb-like imagery. That may seem hyperbolic, but it’s quite apropos for the band’s debut album, Just for a Day, which luxuriates in layers of guitar atmospherics and male/female harmonies.

The band’s rich sound, which contained some obvious Cure influences (“Spanish Air,” “The Sadman”), is the sort of sound one wraps themselves in, content to bliss out to the windswept gloominess. But on “Catch the Breeze,” the band elevates their music into the stratosphere. The first few times I listened to this song, which erupts into a gorgeous, sun-dazzled climax that pierces through the song’s rainy day atmospherics, I was floored… literally. I’d just lay on my bedroom floor in order to better allow Slowdive’s music to wash over me.

It’s an impulse I still feel in my bones whenever I hear those powerful opening strains.