FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
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| MUSIC A little advice? If you have an airline ticket for the same flight as members of Swervedriver - run. Same thing if you find yourself standing next to them outside in a lightning storm, on the same cruise ship, or in the same line for a burger at Jack-In-the-Box. Not to say the band's jinxed, but their luck is shittier than the board of directors for Bre-X, and their future often seems as precarious as that of the resident fat guy on SNL. Many dark forces must have aligned against Swervedriver, for the band to not have achieved even a modicum of success and notoriety. After releasing their 1991 debut Raise - a shoegazing masterpiece of unfiltered abrasion, which included the awe-inspiring "Son of Mustang Ford," complete with mid-song drum solo - and then following it up with successive albums that have attained even loftier heights, Swervedriver remain on the fringe. Once again you can chalk that up to the geniuses that inhabit the music industry. Personnel changes and travel mishaps aside, in the last few years the band has been: dropped by American label A&M and its British-based label Creation a week away from releasing an album (the still hard-to-find Ejector Seat Reservation); and then signed to the US's Geffen from which they were unceremoniously dumped again with a release date for their new album only weeks away. Not surprisingly, it's hard to get any momentum when not only does God decide he hates you, but no one can buy your albums. "It certainly held us back, all the problems," says the band's guitarist Jimmy Hartridge, affably. "But that's entertainment for you, innit? If you go away for too long, people will forget who you are; a lot of people have probably moved on. Maybe they're into Fleetwood Mac now or whatever. "I'm under no false illusions about what it's like. I think we're lucky to still be here, really." And we're lucky they are, as well. Lucky and thankful that Swervedriver were kept precariously alive (by renting out the studio they had built with their healthy advance from Geffen) until Zero Hour Records (distributed by Attic in Canada) rescued their recent release 99th Dream. It's another tour through the buzzing electrical chords of Hartridge's and fellow guitarist Adam Franklin's (the band's core since its inception eight years ago in Oxford) amplified take on lumbering, square-peg pop, that the late '80s and early '90s offered by way of acts such as Ride and My Bloody Valentine. Although this time Swervedriver are notably a little more refined in their sonic sprinkler system musings, as apparently they've discovered brevity. Sure the songs "Electric 77" and "Behind the Scenes of The Sounds & The Times" noodle their way past the seven-minute mark, but there's also some (gasp!) songs that fall short of three minutes. "We did specifically try to be more concise this time. It's quite tricky doing that, it's much easier to create a long song really than to squeeze it all into two or three minutes," Hartridge says. "I like it loud, (but) I don't particularly want to make a sort of unnecessary row, like we used to do in the early days. But some of it creeps in here and there when we get the urge to do it." Hopefully, they'll get the urge to do it more often as the shoegazing ranks continue to dwindle - the most notable exceptions being The Jesus and Mary Chain and Catherine Wheel, who have seemingly returned to the bread and butter on which they were weaned after dalliances in more approachable pop music. Hartridge says it's only natural Swervedriver have continued after so many have fallen. "I'm not surprised, I always thought that we were good, so I think we deserved to hang around for longer than the others. We have a good inter-band relationship, we get along really well - that's another thing that breaks bands up," he says, before adding carelessly: "And nobody has died." Knock wood. |
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