One Track Mind

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To know Adam Franklin‘s music (in all of its myriad manifestations) is to love it–to be drawn in by his knack for effortless hooks and his acrobatic maneuvering between noise and melody. As the frontman for Swervedriver for most of the 1990s (and then again beginning in 2008), Franklin carved out a place among contemporaries and soon-to-be legends such as Ride and My Bloody Valentine. Those bands’ back catalogs make for a great reference point for Franklin’s dense yet tuneful compositions, which tended toward the muscularity of acts like Catherine Wheel.

Since those formative years as a musician, Franklin has refined his trade under the Toshack Highway moniker, an alias which allowed him to explore more ephemeral, experimental terrain from 1999 until 2006. This period was followed by his first release as good old Adam Franklin, 2007′s Bolts of Melody. The return to his given name marked a partial return to the tenor of his first recordings, which is also true of his follow-up, Spent Bullets, and his upcoming third release, I Could Sleep For A Thousand Years (this time as Adam Franklin and the Bolts of Melody), which is slated to hit shelves on June 29th.

Franklin’s latest LP begins with “Yesterday Has Gone Forever,” a catchy, swirling mass of a song that falls somewhere between My Bloody Valentine style chaos and Yo La Tengo’s haphazard indie rock. Structurally, it is a three and a half minute pop song which has been papered over with with distortion pedals and layers of sound; the bones are still visible, but the walls have some thick coats of paint. As with his early work, the guitars are the main attraction on “Yesterday.” They churn, they ring out in half-riffs, they soar and dive, they nest into one another like so many Russian dolls. On one wavelength, acoustic guitars are strummed hard; on a different frequency, electric guitars are processed into oblivion, flanged and delayed. In total, “Yesterday Has Gone Forever” is a masterful thing: an infectious melody tactfully obscured by a man who has written more than his fair share of stellar songs.