A decade later, Swervedriver still has it
Adam Franklin never owned a car, and Brian Wilson never surfed. That hasn't stopped either from making music that expresses the thrill of forward momentum through sound. The Beach Boys mastermind had "Surfin' Safari" and the Swervedriver frontman has "Son of Mustang Ford." Art and music, after all, are more than mere facts. It's the experience they capture and convey that's important.
Although the British-bred Swervies (as they are affectionately known by their fans) never broke big in this country during their original 1990s run, few rock bands in recent memory have so perfectly distilled a churning sonic roil into something suggesting nirvana. They did it again and again at the Paradise Tuesday night, back together and touring after a nearly 10-year hiatus.
From the opening wash of distorted guitar notes of "Sci-Flyer" to the dark jewel tones of "Duress," which capped the encore some 90 minutes later, Swervedriver's set was expansive and controlled. They weren't much to look at - Franklin and Co. mostly stood in place and barely said a word beyond a smile or a nod acknowledging the audience - but it was Swervedriver's sound that was the real star.
"Sandblasted," a low-slung thing of stealth and beauty, was shape-shifted by Franklin's guitar pedal effects that brought it from a spacey simmer to a blistering boil. The towering "Rave Down," which consisted of little more than that two-word phrase, sung from behind what sounded like a wall of guitars (there were only two) and set to an insistent rhythm, was both monolithically heavy and monumentally lovely.
The tune was the closest the band ever got to a hit, but it didn't matter. Its music - an opulent admixture of blissed-out shoegazing melodies powered by the careening roar of hard rock - felt as fiercely potent as ever.
