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1995 was a very bad year for Swervedriver. The quartet recorded a masterful third album, Ejector Seat Reservations. Then,instead of getting rich and famous off its Brit-pop charms, the band got dumped...by three different labels--Creation Records (which released the album in Britain), A&M and Geffen (both of which were supposed to release the album in the United States). Lead singer and guitarist Adam Franklin isn't sure what happened, but the band suddenly found itself in a precarious position. "We were supposed to pay A&M to give the album to Geffen," he says, "which meant borrowing the money off Geffen, giving it to A&M, giving the album to Geffen, and then paying back Geffen. It was a rip-off. Four guys sitting around with no money in their pockets and ridiculous amounts of money being tossed around." In an interview from a tour stop in Baton Rouge, La., Franklin further elucidates the band's travails. "Getting dropped by labels has been a real hassle the last couple of years," he says. "Maybe for a bit of a morning we thought, Oh God, is it worth it? But literally that was only about 15 minutes. We just got our studio built and we're not going to stop making music. We still had something to prove to ourselves, but also to the people that dropped us." Ejector Seat Reservation will go down in history as the band's lost album. But luckily, last month Zero Hour Records released Swervedriver's fourth LP, 99th Dream, in the United States.Savvier than they were a few years ago, the band members decided to self-release in Britain. "The response we've received has been phenomenal," Franklin says. "It's almost like everyone is even more behind us now. A lot of people haven't got the third album, so it seems like a weird jump for us, and I imagine it would be for a fan who hadn't heard Ejector Seat, to go from Mezcal Head [Swervedriver's second album] to 99th Dream, but consequently we've got two albums' worth of material that people haven't heard us play live. And people are actually responding when we play these new songs, and that's really cool." Opening with an epic title track, 99th Dream finds Swervedriver in a laid-back mood. The songs are more narrative than on previous records. Tracks like "She Weaves a Tender Trap" even move toward a "Dear Prudence" framework. Franklin's dreamy vocals have been moved to the forefront, allowing the songs to breathe deeper. Now, rather than focusing on what label it can call home, the band is experimenting with new sounds and ideas. "I think Ejector Seat and 99th Dream are two-of-a-kind, in a similar way that Raise and Mezcal Head were two-of-a-kind," Franklin says. "It's time now for us to strike out a bit for the next thing. We already know everything there is to know about guitars, whereas [electronics] is sort of uncharted territory. The thing with the old records is more riffing, and the sounds were there before the songs. In a way it was like building a song around a sound. We've been playing around, adding machines and cutting up jams. It's a different approach to create a song out of twiddling a few knobs." |
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