Swervedriver rule. Talk to anyone about their first experience listening to or seeing the band live for the first time and you’re bound to hear adjectives like “rocked”, “amazing” or “fucking awesome”. Their debut album Raise (Creation, 1991) stunned listeners, American audiences, and would soon defy the categorization of “shoegaze”; it’s simply a great rock album. The UK press labeled them as shoegazers right from the get-go because of their washy guitar sound. But the Oxford-based quartet excelled at making super-melodic rock that was both dreamy and technically dynamic. Adam Franklin's soaring vocals and screeching wah-wah leads turned heads in the music world and launched a wave of internet discussions about his tunings and tablature.
"Sci-Flyer" kicks off the album with a barrage of guitar noise and relentless wah-wah thanks to main man Adam Franklin, more reminiscent to J. Mascis and Led Zeppelin than a shoegaze wall-of-sound. “Pile Up” and “Sunset” showcases the band’s relentless rhythm section of bassist Adi Vines and drummer Graham Bonner, who eventually disappeared during their first North American tour only to emerge later in San Francisco with the notorious BJM. Knock-out singles “Son of Mustang Ford”, “Rave Down”, and “Sandblasted” are epic washes of sound with Franklin’s dynamite guitar riffs and melodies propelling the songs into space. The album never lets up, never gets boring, and emanates a freeing, wide-screen spirit unlike any bands coming out of England at that time.
After you buy Raise take a further look into the band’s catalog with Juggernaut Rides ’89-’98 on Sanctuary records. It contains all of their best work and many limited, out-of-print singles that emerged between albums and labels. Buy it here, you won’t be disappointed.
-Scott McDonald
Remember Archers of Loaf? They got compared to Pavement quite a bit and had that bass player who looked like the WWF’s Hacksaw Jim Duggan. 1993’s Icky Mettle is noisy, angular, and brutal. They raised the bar of “Indie Rock” after the mushy, and well-deserved, accolades of Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted. But when I listen to this album in particular it represents a specific time, a leap forward, and also brings to mind so many other bands that one can hear in their music (Dinosaur Jr., Superchunk, Mudhoney). This isn’t a nostalgic indie-rock trip down memory lane, this is one of the strongest debuts of that decade. From the cool “All I Ever Wanted…Was To Be Your Spine” convincingly declared on ‘Web in Front’ to the angular punk on “Sick File”, Archers of Loaf rocked and Icky Mettle is a must have.
LR: Hey Britt how’s it going? Britt: Good. LR: Where are you at the moment?
Britt: I’m at my studio here in Austin, Texas working on songs.
LR: Cool. So what made you decide to take on this project?
Britt: I was invited to do it and I thought that it would be fun.
LR: Were you already aware of Brian Reitzell and his soundtrack work?
Britt: Yeah. I had seen Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. We also met a couple of years ago and he contacted me when he was in Austin and we went out to dinner, just talked about doing something someday. When this one started getting developed he asked if I wanted to come down and work on scoring it with him. I didn’t really know how to do that at the time but I thought that it would be fun.
LR: When you were working on the movie how did you decide which Spoon would be right for a particular song?
Britt: Brian picked the Spoon songs and decided where those would go. The thing I worked on him with was the scoring of the instrumental music. And I wrote the new Spoon song for the movie, but I wasn’t quite sure initially where that was going to go.
LR: In the bio it says that there are "fuller vocal versions", I had no idea that certain Spoon tracks were longer or had different versions out there. Britt: I think what they mean is “The Way We Get By” is in the movie instrumentally and he’s referring to the fact that these are versions without the vocals.
LR: Ahhh, that makes sense. So when you’re doing the arranging of the instrumental tracks with Brian what was the best part of that?
Britt: Just figuring out that I could do it. I remember when I went to Los Angeles there was some feeling that I didn’t know what I was doing or how it was going to be done. And when we started working it just kind of came naturally and I don’t know if that’s because of Brian or what. And it also was kind of freeing to be able to work on music that wasn’t going to be pop song. It was like…here’s a scene and what kind of mood do you want to bring to this scene? It was such a different experience.
LR: That must have been nice.
Britt: It was, it was a new experience. Pop music is a fairly unrestricted type of format where I can do anything or make any sound and release it as a Spoon record. It was just a little bit more distancing for me, it wasn’t just a reflection of me, it was something I was doing to compliment the movie. With that sort of direction in mind it made it very clear where we should go with that.
LR: So while you’re watching this movie did you get to a point where you started to think about watching other movies in a different way because of this experience?
Britt: It definitely made me look at this movie in a different way because I just saw it for the first time with everything in it last week and it doesn’t seem like a normal movie. When I watch movies, I don’t know if everybody is like this, but I can get really emotionally attached and just kind of lose myself in it. I know my ex-girlfriend couldn’t sit through a whole movie and would get kind of antsy. While I was watching this movie I couldn’t do that because it’s like I know how that happened and I remember seeing this scene a hundred times while we were working on it.
LR: So if you would have gone back and seen this movie for the first time, including you being a part of the soundtrack, would you have thought of this movie in a different way?
Britt: Oh yeah totally. It’s a really good movie and I know that because I really enjoyed when I first saw it before we started to work on it. I’m sure I would have been drawn in just like most movies I like.
LR: Are there any ideas for music or projects that this movie kind of opened the door up to? Would you want to do more scoring like this?
Britt: To me I really just want to do rock and roll. It was a fun thing to do and if something else comes up like this and I want to do it then I’d love to do it, but rock and roll is the main thing for me.
LR: Right. You guys are working on a Spoon album right now, how’s that going?
Britt: Yes. It’s going good. It’s taking a long time, but it usually takes a long time. We don’t know what label it’s going to come out on but I think this record is going to be a good one.
LR: What are your thoughts with your next label? Is there something you have in mind for Spoon or do you want to approach promoting it differently?
Britt: Well, I don’t really have anything new or new ideas for that. It’s just that we don’t actually owe anyone a record. It could still come out on Merge, which would be cool with me, but we haven’t worked on that aspect of the music. We’ll figure all that out later.
-Scott McDonald
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