Search - Adam Franklin :: Spent Bullets

From 1990 to 1998 Adam Franklin was the singer, guitarist and main songwriter for London-based Swervedriver; contemporaries of and label mates with My Bloody Valentine and Ride but with a more adrenalized rock n roll sound, showing flashes of Husker Du and Sonic Youth. Then from 1999 to 2006 Adam recorded and toured as Toshack Highway, a gentler but no less inventive folky/electronic/film-soundtracky hybrid, releasing a full album and flurry of EPs, split releases, seven inch singles and the like.
In 2007 an album that had started out as the next Toshack Highway release became the first album to be released under the moniker Adam Franklin and was titled Bolts of Melody - which also became the name of Adam s adaptable, forever-changing and quite formidable live group. Sometimes a rock n roll four-piece and at times expanding to take in pedal steel and piano, the live band and album showcased a return of sorts to the searing, guitar-constructed songwriting style Franklin s followers were familar with from Swervedriver days, but also with an air of the musical experimentation more redolent of the Toshack era.
In 2008 Franklin found time not only to tour once again with the re-ignited Swervedriver as they were raptuously received on their first tour for a decade, but also to tour and record the debut album of Magnetic Morning, his new collaboration with Sam Fogarino of Interpol, and record - with the Bolts of Melody band - the second Adam Franklin release, Spent Bullets.
Bullets walks beyond the ground broken on Bolts and is a more direct, varied and satisfying album than ever before. The power and melody that has always coursed through the veins of Adam s electric songs is in full effect on tunes such as Surge, Teardops Keep Fallin Out My Head and Autumn Leaf. And then in the likes of Big Sur, Champs or End Credits, there are all sorts of other unexpected and intriguing sonic fingerprints - smudged evocations of Scott Walker soundtracking a French spy movie or The Temptations refracted through side three of Electric Ladyland perhaps. In short, some of the most sonicly beautiful songs of Franklin s career converge on one disc that aims straight for the heart.