First Look: New Adam Franklin Album

Former Swervedriver/Toshack Highway mainman's second album with his Bolts of Melody combo pits reflective melodies against swirling, My Bloody Valentine-worthy masses of guitars. It's released later this month on Second Motion.

By Jennifer Kelly

With Swervedriver, Adam Franklin had an eight-year run spinning out dreamy textures of distorted guitar that, however, loud they might turn in live performance, had an unruffled serenity to them.  Bolts of Melody, following a quieter interlude as Toshack Highway, pursues the same muscular, feedback-glazed reveries as Swervedriver, its reflective melodies hedged with swirling masses of guitar sound.   Franklin's band - which now includes Ley Taylor on guitar, Josh Stoddard on bass, Gerard Menke on pedal steel - has gotten noticeably more confident on second Bolts outing  I Could Sleep for a Thousand Years, building dense, hallucinatory thickets of sound around Franklin's rueful songs. 

"Yesterday Has Gone Forever," the album's first cut and one of its best, pits soft, ruminative lyrics against a firestorm of distorted guitar a la My Bloody Valentine.  Its instrumental layers shimmer, waver and fade like heat mirages in psychedelic uncertainty.  "I'll Be Your Mechanic" leans more into Sonic Youth's lyrical washes of feedback, a muted roar cresting under Franklin's worn-in murmur.   "She Is Closer Now Than I've Ever Been" is janglier, quieter, more introspective, yet haunted by the same bittersweet backwards-looking.   And long, lovely "Take Me Too My Leader," follows a shambolic tambourine over brightly colored melodies that have the symmetry of pop, the gauzy luminosity of experimental guitar rock.  

Even without the guitar-driven sturm und drang, this would be one of 2010's prettiest pop records.  With it, it's something else altogether stronger, more dramatic and more affecting.

[Photo Credit: Johnny Moto]