How do you best the anti-guitar-god bluster of arguably the most sonically bold and melodically sophisticated band of England’s shoegaze era? If you’re Swervedriver’s unflappable former leader, Adam Franklin, you don’t even try. You simply work off the various templates for greatness set forth by your former outfit, which, quite frankly, spewed out enough novel ideas to sustain a half-dozen indie-rock careers. Which brings us to Franklin’s latest, I Could Sleep For A Thousand Years (Second Motion), whose initial tracks were hammered out in New York late last year with his newly minted backup outfit, Bolts Of Melody. Sleep is Franklin’s most well-rounded collection to date, balancing the more laid-back guitar balladry and pop sensibilities of his last two solo albums with the ornery, volatile spark of vintage Swervedriver largely missing on those efforts. Franklin will be guest-editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him as well as our 2009 Lost Classics post on Swervedriver’s Mezcal Head.
Franklin: Neil Krug is a photographer, filmmaker and music promo director from Lawrence, Kan. His startlingly beautiful photographic images come not only from having a psychedelic eye but apparently also from using expired Kodak film, which fades out the colours and gives each photo a kind of 1970s gauze. Krug says one of his main influences is Sergio Leone‘s spaghetti-Westerns, which I’m seriously down with.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybWxQPvOMC8
