I found a copy of Swervedriver's first album, Raise (1991), in a Springfield, Missouri pawn shop. This was spring of '95, during my freshman year in college. It was lying dusty in a cardboard box alongside a few other beat-up CDs and I probably paid a dollar for it. At the time I was hungry for anything soaking in massive guitar blast - Catherine Wheel, Smashing Pumpkins, Slowdive, stuff like that - and my craving had given me an eagle eye for spotting album art that would deliver those results. Raise's cover was a pixilated screen grab of a nuclear bomb detonation framed in cinematic widescreen. It looked noisy and huge, I thought.
Obsession followed. It's not an exaggeration to say I probably logged close to a thousand listens of the track "Deep Seat" alone. The lyrics were ambiguous and desolate: You close my eyes without blinking/ You read my thoughts without thinking/ I swallow salt when you're kneeling/ We lie and stare at the ceiling. And I did exactly that, flat on my back on my dorm bed, staring at the ceiling in my headphone womb and reliving my relationship "tragedies" on loop, my finger inches away from the Discman's repeat button. (Yeah, I was pretty dramatic back then, but that was nothing compared to when I discovered Jeff Buckley.)
Though it was a great fit for me, in most ways "Deep Seat" was not a typical Swervedriver song. For one, it was depressing and built around a slurred, galloping beat, whereas their songs of the period tended to speed ahead straight and fast and sound like Hunter S. Thompson pill-popping through the desert in his convertible, in the opening scene of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Additionally, though Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge's nimble, unconventional guitar work was and is a main attraction of the band, there were few solos in early Swervedriver music, only layers - a thousand tongues of texture lapping in and out of the mix. But "Deep Seat" climaxed in a guitar solo. Two actually, the second of which is a heart breaker - a howling wah-wah pedal wail that sounds verbal and has all the qualities of human suffering.
Swervedriver - "Deep Seat" [From Raise]
I've never had such a strong sense of aesthetic overlap as the one I got listening to Swervedriver. Their music began to get grouped with all kinds of things in my mind. Deserts, road movies, drug shamanism, Hemingway, jean jackets, poetry, muscle cars, Kerouac, booze, sex, mysticism, Mediterranean breezes, snake rattles, love letters, Fitzgerald... It was coolly savage and smart, like all my favorite authors. If the sun hit the sidewalk bright enough, I thought of a Spanish adobe bricked roof and Hemingway in Spain and that felt like Swervedriver. Like Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, it had a foreigner's mythic perspective of the American Southwest, only imagine those films scored by the Stooges rather than Morricone and you've got a better idea. Swervedriver were the sound of everything wide or sad or unhinged inside me. It was epic but contained, the sonic sprawl of the band held in check by songwriter Adam Franklin's English reserve and rock lyrics-as-literature.
It wasn't long before I invested in a copy of Mezcal Head (1993), their breakthrough follow-up for Creation. Mezcal Head made good on everything Raise promised. They worked for the first time with producer Alan Moulder (My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, Blonde Redhead), who would handle every record after, and his ability to make mixes sound smothered yet destinct gave Swervedriver's power the articulation it needed.
Swervedriver - "Duel" [From Mezcal Head]
Swervedriver - "Blowin' Cool" [From Mezcal Head]
I'm not really sure why Swervedriver got tagged as a shoegazer band - other than the predominance of guitars in the mix and a heavy abuse of effects pedals - but Mezcal Head should have sunk the use of that term for them. Sure, there was something vaguely exotic about Franklin's mannered Oxford accent poking through the heavy space rock, but unlike Chapterhouse or My Bloody Valentine, they didn't sound shy or rely on the contrast of mopey dirges played at deafening levels for dramatic effect. They were quick, energetic and jarring. Rather than being washed out, their guitar tones were often prickly or glistening and the interplay between Franklin and Hartridge was as complimentary and angular as Television's Tom Verlain and Richard Lloyd. There was a sludginess to their sound, but it wasn't the effete, twee sludge of Ride or Lush's patently English approach. It was an American mud, more Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth.
Although Franklin's gift for melody and songcraft was only beginning to expand, he's never written better lyrics than the ones on Mezcal Head, like this from "Girl on a Motorbike": Followed the girl on a motorbike/ Saw her enter a bar/ It's dark inside with candles' burn and/ To liberate her scars/ She Spanish-dance on the table/ With butterflies that burn/ It's like an incessant fox-hunt/ Too many lessons learned. There are few works of art, in any medium, that I liked 15 years ago and can stand by today. But those lyrics still work for me.
In 1995, coming off high-profile U.S. tours with Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins, they released Ejector Seat Reservation, the product of their largest budget yet. It's now considered by many fans to be Swervedriver's finest hour, but it was also the beginning of a vicious string of bad luck for the band: the week the record hit stores, their label dropped them. Some said it was so Creation could focus on Oasis, others that they were still struggling from the release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, which was rumored to have cost £250,000 and to have nearly bankrupted the label. But Franklin says it may have had more to do with the fact that, just when they turned the finished record in, owner Alan McGee was returning to London from LA where he had partied too hard and, as a result, had a "bad trip" on the flight back. When McGee received Ejector Seat Reservation he freaked, considering the name and the title track's lyrics about planes crashing and "psychotics tripping in the aisles" to be a bad omen.
All of this happened in the pre-internet days for me, and so I was ignorant. It wasn't until the Spring of '96 that I discovered the web and its abundant fountain of knowledge on the low-profile import acts I had been following for years. I ordered a copy of Ejector Seat Reservation from the band and waited, ripe with anticipation after over-absorbing their previous releases.
I wasn't prepared for Ejector Seat's loose sound and classic rock influences. I dug that drummer Jez Hindmarsh and bassist Steve George were coming into their own as a big-bottomed rhythm section on par with The Verve or Primal Scream, but the progression was shocking. It was tonally darker and rawer than Mezcal Head and even playful in places. To be honest, I was a little disappointed. It was their pop record, and referenced a whole bunch of music from The Kinks to The Who that I didn't yet know anything about. I didn't totally get it, but the band had earned the benefit of the doubt with me and so I kept at it for nearly a year before I realized that it was, in fact, actually genius.
Swervedriver - "The Other Jesus" [From Ejector Seat Reservation]
Swervedriver - "Plan 7 Star Satellite 10"
[Bonus track from Ejector Seat Reservation]
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