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SWERVEDRIVER SHARE FIRST TRACK FROM FORTHCOMING NEW ALBUM ‘FUTURE RUINS’
RELEASED JANUARY 25TH ON DANGERBIRD RECORDS
 
LISTEN TO ‘MARY WINTER’
 
PRE-ORDER ‘FUTURE RUINS’ HERE
 

Photo: Steve Gullick
 
“Space travel rock’n’roll” – that’s how the band initially self-identified their sound. This was back in the 1990s, before the aspirational dreams of the computer age collided with reality. Across the four-album arc of their first era – Raise (1991); Mezcal Head (1993); Ejector Seat Reservation (1995); 99th Dream (1997) – Swervedriver made music that was all about the journey: songs called “For Seeking Heat”, “Planes Over The Skyline”, “Juggernaut Rides”, “93 Million Miles From The Sun And Counting”. Swervedriver simulated the thrill of propulsion, the euphoric arrival, the anticipation of going back again (or not)… of moving on.
 
            And move on they did. During 10 years in absentia, the band’s legend grew. Sages spoke mistily of these four desert rock horsemen of the apocalypse who came from Oxford and were shunned as exiles in their own land. In 2005, a two-disc anthology was compiled with the band’s involvement, and foretold a resurrection. Sure enough, the trip resumed in 2008, with Swervedriver encountering the acclaim they ought to have enjoyed a decade earlier. A fifth album, I Wasn’t Born To Lose You, emerged in 2015, a mere 17 years after its predecessor, and trumpeted some eternal Swervedriver virtues: the intricate, fissile guitar patterns of Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge, baked hard then dispatched in giant monolithic waves by the tactile rhythm section. As the opening song “Autodidact” had it: “Holy fuel forever spilled”.
 
            So much for the resurrection, now for the reckoning. The new Swervedriver album is titled Future Ruins, a two-word précis of its dread thrills. It opens with “Mary Winter”, a song narrated by a recognizable Swervedriver archetype: a traveler, hurtling away from this world. “Planet Earth long gone/And my feet won’t touch the ground.” But where is the traveler headed? And why? The second song, “The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air”, offers some possible answers: “We’ve stumbled into the end of days/Where the future comes home to cry…”
 
            “There’s a lot of foreboding with regard to the future on this album,” agrees Adam Franklin. “Space is in there a lot too. In the first song, the character is a spaceman who’s trying to remember what life is really like. Also, it could be about somewhere in the world where winter isn’t like the winter here. A sunny place, but it’s December or January and you’re trying to remember winter. Something’s going on.”
 
            That something began in October 2017, with a two-week stint of tracking at MAKE Records Studio in Los Angeles. Having made I Wasn’t Born To Lose You hard on the heels of an Australian tour, the band decided to repeat the process and bottle the momentum of a just-completed US tour performing both Raise and Mezcal Head in their entirety. “That’s a good way to record,” says Adam, “because you’ve literally just seen the whites of the audience’s eyes and you’re thinking, ‘If that audience from last night were here now…’ You can’t get too mellow. We came home with 30 different songs.”
 
            There quickly followed a further 10 days’ vocals and overdubs at Seaside Studios in Brighton. Stoking the creative energies was engineer TJ Doherty. A Grammy winner for his work on Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, his diverse credit list also includes Lou Reed and Steely Dan, Stephen Malkmus and Joanna Newsom, Sonic Youth and Selfish Cunt. But the band knew him in a previous life, from their first decade of existence. “He was a fan,” says Adam. “We first met because he was down the front at all the gigs in New York and New Jersey a long lost time ago. He ended up going to engineering school and worked on all these cool records.”
 
            The final 10 tracks were then mixed in spring 2018, as the band toured Europe – again, infusing the recordings with road-slick fumes. Future Ruins exhibits Swervedriver’s fabled widescreen escapism, but with a tension that echoes a sleeve image of Coney Island in skeletal monochrome, like a post mortem photograph of a failed utopia. The title song offers a grim assessment of humanity’s current condition: “We are ruled by fools/These are future ruins/That the king is insane/Is now old news.”
 
            “That was an early lyric, I sang that one in LA, one of about three or four that I sang there,” notes Adam. “It just came out. A rage at the state of the world. There’s more where that came from. “Drone Lover”, a song that predates the last album, is a comment on the depersonalized nature of 21st century techno-warfare. For all its melody’s humming mood elevation, “The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air” feels like an elegy, with one crushing couplet after another: “Choose your colors wisely/Because things ain’t the same as in days gone by.” That song’s title – “it has a resonance that fits with these times,” says Adam – evokes the alienation wrought by the mass embrace of so-called ‘social’ media; a perspective on our contemporary malaise that’s also echoed in “Everybody’s Going Somewhere And No-One’s Going Anywhere”, a spoken word dreamscape.  “Everybody’s got the same amount of time on the planet,” explains Adam. “There might be a couple in Italy, 90 years old, they’ve been married for 70, they’ve never left the country, and they might possibly have had a better life than the person running around who gets a heart attack at 40 after earning 2 million dollars.”
 
The trip ends with “Radio-Silent”’s ghostly seven-minute afterburn, its lyric comprising just 26 words: “We’re all so alone/And we all have to live as one/And we all must exist as one/And we all must resist as one.” The track ends with police sirens and an electronic snap. “It’s loud, but it’s impotent rage,” says Adam. “Everything is completely fucked up. There’s no coming back from that one.”
           
So the journey’s over, and yet Swervedriver ride on. Just as there was never any thought of I Wasn’t Born To Lose You being a last hurrah for old time’s sake, Future Ruins presents a band moving with real time/real life vitality. It showcases new tricks and classic hallmarks: pop songs which don’t have choruses, like “Mary Winter”; odd arrangements and weird contrasts, like “Spiked Flower”’s rock’n’roll grind breaking out to acknowledge English landscape painter John Constable; and a lyric that references Echo & The Bunnymen. See if you can spot that one…
           
So space travel rock’n’roll: it still applies.  “Sometimes I think we’re deceptively complicated, which is better than being the other way around!” Adam laughs. “I love being back in this band. We’re playing places that we’ve either not played in a long time, or new places like Singapore, where there were 20 year old kids there and they’re singing the words to the new songs… We don’t want to be the band that just plays the old albums. We’re glad to have a whole bunch of new songs. We’re on it again.”   Keith Cameron – October 2018
 
 
Swervedriver are:
Adam Franklin (guitar, vocals)
Jimmy Hartridge (guitar)
Mikey Jones (drums)
Mick Quinn (bass)
 
‘Future Ruins’ tracklisting:
1 Mary Winter
2 The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air  
3 Future Ruins
4 Theeascending
5 Drone Lover
6 Spiked Flower
7 Everybody’s Going Somewhere & No-One’s Going Anywhere    
8 Golden Remedy
9 Good Times Are So Hard To Follow  
10 Radio-Silent
 
 
For press inquiries: Jo Murray
 

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I think some of you have been waiting a while for this.

  • 180 gram audiophile vinyl
  • Including 4-page booklet
  • Expanded edition
  • Featuring four bonus tracks “Maelstrom”,  “The Directors Cut Of Your Life”,  “Just Sometimes” and “Neon Lights Glow”
  • Three sides of music and an etched D-side
  • First pressing of 2.500 individually numbered copies on silver & black mixed vinyl

http://www.bullmoose.com/p/27655872/swervedriver-ejector-seat-reservation-silver-black-mixed-vinyl-2lp-silver-black-mixed-vinyl

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Swervedriver – Guitar tuning guide

*Note from Adam: I have to say before you read this, I have absolutely no idea where some of these tunings come from! But I’m gonna leave them here because they must have worked for someone at some time and the DGDGBB looks kinda interesting, though I’ve never used it.

The most definitive word on tunings is that every single song is played in standard EADGBE with the exception of:

Kill the Superheroes – FADADE

She’s beside Herself – EADGAE

Pile Up (Jim) / Lead Me Where You Dare (Adam) – DADGBE

Duel / You Find It Everywhere – FCDGCD

Blowin’ Cool / Girl On A Motorbike / Duress (Jim) / Planes Over The Skyline / Year of the Girl / 99th Dream / For A Day Like Tomorrow / English Subtitles  – GCDGCD

Duress (Adam) / Behind the Scenes of the Sounds & the Times – GABABC#

MM Abduction / A Change Is Gonna Come – EADGBD

The Other Jesus – DGCFAD

Deep Wound – EADFBE

There are probably a few others that I don’t quite recall now – usually one or two note bends on the odd string on a standard tuning just to make certain parts easier to play or more interesting tonally. There are some lovely new ones on the forthcoming album but in the meantime read on and thanks to everyone that attempted to tab out a song.

Adam, July 2018

Alright, these tunings were submitted on Ajay’s site YEARS ago, and for some reason 
I had printed them at the time. Pretty glad I did. They were typed up originally by 
a guy called James Anderson and were culled from a guitar mag article in December 
’92. Anyway without further ado…

General Notes:

Article quote: “Sometimes he drops his B string down to A and keeps everything else 
in conventional tuning. ‘It lets you double the A in octaves,’ Adam explains. ‘You 
can get a droning effect which is quite nice.”

Mustang Ford, Rave Down, Laze it up, Zedhead, Afterglow
E A D F# B E

Mustang Ford, Rave Down
F A D A D E

Kill the Superheroes, She’s Beside Herself
F A D G C E
F A D A D E

Flawed, Never lose that Feeling
D G D G B B (open G)

Barring your finger across the D G D G gives you a rather full sound,
which can be made into an even fuller sound by following the lower diagram

D G D G B B
2 2 2 4 5 5

Duress
G A B A B C# : Adam
G C D G C D  : Jimmy

Girl on a Motorbike, Blowin’ Cool 
G C D G C D

Duel
F C D G C D