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  Adam Franklin - Bolts of MelodyBy Daniel JohnsonOctober 29, 2007 Adam Franklin spent the '90s scorching the earth with the brilliance of his magnificent and under-revered band Swervedriver. If Swervedriver's high-speed psychedelia and bristling guitars were a muscle car, Franklin was the engine that powered it all. His songs were a personal mythology of cool and filtered the drugged-out decadence of Hunter S. Thompson through a lens of beat romanticism; lyrics-as-literature which he cut into a rock'n'roll shag and sung in the broken-nosed deadpan of Elvis Costello. But as vivid as those songs were, his guitar was twice as expressive and, somehow, more vocal. He made it a talking beast and it wailed with fury in dissonant, angular moans of melody and effects-pedal orgasms. Then, after nearly a decade of unflagging quality despite an Odyssean string of bad luck with record labels, Swervedriver simply ran out of gas. Franklin set down his electric guitar, along with his energy, to fiddle with keyboards and sad songs, releasing the gorgeous, Morricone-on-krautrock of the self-titled Toshack Highway album in 2000 and a few subdued, folk-flecked EPs in following years. Franklin minus his electric guitar still equaled greatness because there had always been stellar songcraft underneath Swervedriver's thick blankets of drone and squeal - now it was finally being given a chance to breathe. But it was a bit like Jordan playing semi-pro baseball. You can't blame a guy for trying something new, but there's no ignoring the faint stink of a singular genius going to waste. On Bolts of Melody, Franklin's self-imposed exile from the electric guitar is finally over, and the unbottling of his affection for its energy and versatility - the ability to be anything from fuzzy to feminine - is shameless. His snaky phrasing undulates gracefully through the starlit fantasies of "Walking in Heaven's Foothills." "Shining Somewhere" and "Seize the Day" are dark, crunchy bombast exploding around the glowing uplift of lyrics like I don't believe the life you shine is gone/It's shining somewhere and the carnal daydream Seize the day/I just want to seize the day all day with you in bed. Franklin sounds renewed, especially in the gentle "Birdsong (Moonshiner Version)" where he returns for a minute to the acoustic fingerpicking of recent years and scores the lullaby with a recording of distant rain and plucked harmonics. In a voice that could be Nick Drake after a fist fight he sings "I found a reason to live again/I found a heartbeat from inside," and it's a far cry from his bleary odes to defeat written in the wake of Swervedriver's demise, like Toshack Highway's "I've Lost the Feeling" and "I Thought I Saw My Ship A-Coming." Some artists quietly do their best work a few years removed from the buzz and momentum of their career heydays. That's Adam Franklin on Bolts of Melody; the sound of a man with nothing left to prove other than to himself. It's both a progression and a refinement - from Charlie Francis's richly captured recording and production work, to the crackerjack enthusiasm of the backing band, to Franklin's development as a composer and lyricist, which includes an increasing willingness to infuse his wordplay with deeper life experiences. Franklin hasn't lost the feeling. He's just deepened it.
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