Adam Franklin & Bolts of Melody | I Could Sleep For a Thousand Years
Written by Rev. Theodore Marley Renwick-Renwick // August 23, 2010 // On the Record // No comments
Most Likely To: be displaced in time.
Swervedriver were always the odd men out in the original wave of shoegaze. While they definitely shared the feedback and roar of the other bands in the genre, they never really went in for the dizzying wooziness of bands like My Bloody Valentine or Ride. If other shoegazer bands imparted the feeling of riding an out of control merry-go-round at the county fair, the car-obsessed Swervedriver felt more like a round in the same fair’s demolition derby: you still ended up shaky on your feet, but not for the same reasons.
On I Could Sleep For a Thousand Years, former Swervedriver frontman Adam Franklin comes probably the closest he ever has to the prototypical shoegazer sound. Hushed vocals sing forlorn minor key melodies atop backing tracks where all the guitar parts seem to be slightly out of phase while sheets of noise and feedback drop in out of nowhere before disappearing again. It all conjures up that early 1990s vibe of being half asleep on a boat sailing in circles on rough seas.
I Could Sleep pretty evenly splits the difference between Swervedriver and Franklin’s later outfit, Toshack Highway. The hardest rocking tracks like “I’ll Be Yr Mechanic” and “Sinking Ships” don’t wallop with the same brute force that Swervedriver usually punched their listeners in the face with, but by the same token the quiet numbers are still more electric than the more pastoral dream-pop of Toshack Highway. Meanwhile, things like the tuneful mosquito buzz of “Spent Bullets” or the gently propulsive keyboard pulse running through “The Road is Long” don’t sound much like either band.
Overall, Franklin & Bolts of Melody have delivered an album of exemplary shoegazing pop music. Twenty years on, he’s finally made an album that actually sounds like it fits with the movement he was originally considered part of, but that’s cool. What he recorded in the early ’90s sounded great then and still does now, just as this album sounds as good now as it would’ve then.
Watch a live performance of “Big Sur” by Adam Franklin & Bolts of Melody:
