SWERVEDRIVER SHARE “SPIKED FLOWER” VIDEO
FUTURE RUINSΒ OUT JANUARY 25 ON DANGERBIRD RECORDS
βWhen recording Spiked Flower, everything went very Television for a moment… We were in downtown LA and Television came and played next door to the hotel we were staying at. On the Sunday, as I walked to pick up my laundry, I saw Tom Verlaine climb into a car on a side street and then Jimmy had this riff and I started singing βWhy donβt you talk to me?β to it and it made me think of Marquee Moon. It didnβt sound like them in the end though”. – Adam Franklin
βSpace travel rockβnβrollβ β thatβs how the band initially self-identified their sound. This was back in the 1990s, before the aspirational dreams of the computer age collided with reality. Across the four-album arc of their first era β Raise (1991); Mezcal Head (1993); Ejector Seat Reservation (1995); 99th Dream (1997) β Swervedriver made music that was all about the journey: songs called “For Seeking Heat”, βPlanes Over The Skylineβ, βJuggernaut Ridesβ, β93 Million Miles From The Sun And Countingβ. Swervedriver simulated the thrill of propulsion, the euphoric arrival, the anticipation of going back again (or not)β¦ of moving on.
And move on they did. During 10 years in absentia, the bandβs legend grew. Sages spoke mistily of these four desert rock horsemen of the apocalypse who came from Oxford and were shunned as exiles in their own land. In 2005, a two-disc anthology was compiled with the bandβs involvement, and foretold a resurrection. Sure enough, the trip resumed in 2008, with Swervedriver encountering the acclaim they ought to have enjoyed a decade earlier. A fifth album, I Wasnβt Born To Lose You, emerged in 2015, a mere 17 years after its predecessor, and trumpeted some eternal Swervedriver virtues: the intricate, fissile guitar patterns of Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge, baked hard then dispatched in giant monolithic waves by the tactile rhythm section. As the opening song βAutodidactβ had it: βHoly fuel forever spilledβ.
So much for the resurrection, now for the reckoning. The new Swervedriver album is titled Future Ruins, a two-word prΓ©cis of its dread thrills. It opens with Mary Winter, a song narrated by a recognizable Swervedriver archetype: a traveler, hurtling away from this world. βPlanet Earth long gone/And my feet wonβt touch the ground.β But where is the traveler headed? And why? The second song, The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air, offers some possible answers: βWeβve stumbled into the end of days/Where the future comes home to cryβ¦β
βThereβs a lot of foreboding on this album,β agrees Adam Franklin. βSpace is in there a lot too. In the first song, the character is a spaceman whoβs trying to remember what life is really like. Also, it could be about somewhere in the world where winter isnβt like the winter here. A sunny place, but itβs December or January and youβre trying to remember winter. Somethingβs going on.β
That something began in October 2017, with a two-week stint with Franklin, Hartridge, Mikey Jones (drums) and Mick Quinn (bass) tracking at MAKE Records Studio in Los Angeles. Having made I Wasnβt Born To Lose You hard on the heels of an Australian tour, the band decided to repeat the process and bottle the momentum of a just-completed US tour performing both Raise and Mezcal Head in their entirety. βThatβs a good way to record,β says Adam, βbecause youβve literally just seen the whites of the audienceβs eyes and youβre thinking, βIf that audience from last night were here nowβ¦β You canβt get too mellow. We came home with 30 different songs.β
ThereΒ quickly followed a further 10 daysβ vocals and overdubs at Seaside Studios in Brighton.Β Stoking the creative energies was engineer TJ Doherty. A Grammy winner for his work on WilcoβsΒ A Ghost Is Born, his diverse credit list also includes Lou Reed and Steely Dan, Stephen Malkmus and Joanna Newsom, Sonic Youth and Selfish Cunt. But the band knew him in a previous life, from their first decade of existence. βHe was a fan,β says Adam. βWe first met because he was down the front at all the gigs in New York and New Jersey a long lost time ago. He ended up going to engineering school and worked on all these cool records.β
The final 10 tracks were then mixed in spring 2018, as the band toured Europe β again, infusing the recordings with road-slick fumes. Future Ruins exhibits Swervedriverβs fabled widescreen escapism, but with a tension that echoes a sleeve image of Coney Island in skeletal monochrome (from an original photo by Spencer Bewley), like a post mortem photograph of a failed utopia. The title song offers a grim assessment of humanityβs current condition: βWe are ruled by fools/These are future ruins/That the king is insane/Is now old news.β
“That was an early lyric, I sang that one in LA, one of about three or four that I sang there,β notes Adam. βIt just came out. A rage at the state of the world.” Thereβs more where that came from. Drone Lover, a song that predates the last album, is a comment on the depersonalized nature of 21st century techno-warfare. For all its melodyβs humming mood elevation, βThe Lonely Crowd Fades In The Airβ feels like an elegy, with one crushing couplet after another: βChoose your colors wisely/Because things ainβt the same as in days gone by.β That songβs title β βit has a resonance that fits with these times,β says Adam β evokes the alienation wrought by the mass embrace of so-called βsocialβ media; a perspective on our contemporary malaise thatβs also echoed in βEverybodyβs Going Somewhere And No-Oneβs Going Anywhereβ, a spoken word dreamscape.Β βEverybodyβs got the same amount of time on the planet,β explains Adam. βThere might be a couple in Italy, 90 years old, theyβve been married for 70, theyβve never left the country, and they might possibly have had a better life than the person running around who gets a heart attack at 40 after earning 2 million dollars.β
The trip ends with βRadio-Silentββs ghostly seven-minute afterburn, its lyric comprising just 26 words: βWeβre all so alone/And we all have to live as one/And we all must exist as one/And we all must resist as one.β The track ends with police sirens and an electronic snap. βItβs loud, but itβs impotent rage,β says Adam. βEverything is completely fucked up. Thereβs no coming back from that one.β
So the journeyβs over, and yet Swervedriver ride on. Just as there was never any thought of I Wasnβt Born To Lose You being a last hurrah for old timeβs sake, Future Ruins presents a band moving with real time/real life vitality. It showcases new tricks and classic hallmarks: pop songs which donβt have choruses, like βMary Winterβ; odd arrangements and weird contrasts, like Spiked Flowerβs rockβnβroll grind breaking out to acknowledge English landscape painter John Constable; and a lyric that references Echo & The Bunnymen. See if you can spot that oneβ¦
So space travel rockβnβroll: it still applies.Β βSometimes I think weβre deceptively complicated, which is better than being the other way around!β Adam laughs. βI love being back in this band. Weβre playing places that weβve either not played in a long time, or new places like Singapore, where there were 20 year old kids there and theyβre singing the words to the new songsβ¦ We donβt want to be the band that just plays the old albums. Weβre glad to have a whole bunch of new songs. Weβre on it again.β Keith Cameron β October 2018
Swervedriver
Future Ruins
(Dangerbird Records)
Release Date: January 25, 2019