#future ruins

Swervedriver broke up in 1998, but like many bands of similar vintage, reunited in the aughts first at the 2008 Coachella festival and later in a series of tours. In 2015, Swervedriver released its first post-reunion albums, I Wasn’t Born to Lose You. Dusted appears not to have reviewed the disc, but the Quietus summed up the positive but not rapturous reception, saying, “All in all, there is freshness and intrigue for those that need it—and for those that don't, a reliable consistency with their 90s incarnation. The new Swervedriver may be clean and sentimental, but the ‘petroleum spirit’ of their youth still keeps its pace.”

Future Ruins, then, is Swervedriver’s second post-break-up album, reconvening four long-time members—Adam Franklin, Jimmy Hartridge, Steve George and Mikey Jones—for a very recognizable iteration of the band’s sound. It’s quite good, though, of course, wildly out of sync with what’s going on in music right now. If you ever liked Swervedriver, you’ll like this a lot.

“Marywinter,” the single, starts with a thump and bash of cymbals, the drums drawing hard-edges around billowing atmospheres of sound. Franklin’s soft murmuring voice slips in and out of the mix, like a tendrils of seaweed getting pulled down into surf. There are hard, prickly sounds—a woozy MBV-like guitar pull-off, a squall of bass—jutting out from the roil of sound, but the effect is calming, a white noise rush of static colored with melody.

Elsewhere, Swervedriver waxes contemplative, as in the slower paced title cut, and the dreaming closer, “Radio-Silent.” “Everybody’s Going Somewhere” slips off the leash a bit, with spoken word vocals set against chilled translucencies of guitar and electric keyboards; it sounds more delicate and interior-facing than the large-scale bangers. Yet even these have a tranquility within the roar. “Golden Remedy” hazards a saw-toothed guitar riff, hard and rough and stinging. But the melody laps around it like a sea of codeine. You know it probably hurts but you can’t feel it from inside this cloud of calm.

None of this is so very different from Swervedriver’s catalog, or indeed from the guitar-crashing dream pop of Adam Franklin’s Bolts of Melody, but it is very fine anyway. In these latter days of everything available at once, what’s the point of linear progression anyway? Music is music, always crowding around us. If it sounds good, why not? And indeed, “Good Times are Hard to Follow” sounds pretty damned good with its banging, squealing guitars, its whipped-cream-fog-bank mass of vocals. In it, Franklin contemplates history, singing perhaps of a love affair, perhaps of a life in music, “I love the way it starts, but I hate the way it ends, the end denies the start of its sense.”

Not yet it doesn’t. Not by a long shot.