It’s a funny coincidence that Swervedriver are playing Glasgow in the same week that Ride make their return to the UK stage for the first time in 20 years, at the city’s Barrowland. After all, it was Ride’s Mark Gardener who handed a copy of his fellow Oxford natives’ demo to Creation Records boss Alan McGee in 1989. As legend has it, he signed the band immediately after listening to the tape while cruising around LA in a limousine.
I Wasn’t Born to Lose You, Swervedriver’s first new album in 17 years, prompted this latest tour, but there have been a few since they reformed in 2008, 10 years after a split occasioned by failing commercial fortunes. Opener Autodidact, the chorus hook of which sounds as if it wants to break into Teenage Fanclub’s I Need Direction, suggests they’ve lost none of their dreamy dissonance, but they retain a frustrating habit of nervously burying vocals six feet deep in the mix. Cap-wearing singer and guitarist Adam Franklin’s crusty dreadlocks have been wisely shorn and committed to memories of washed-out looking videos on early 90s MTV. Supergrass’s Mick Quinn fills in on bass for the absent Steve George. Swervedriver tend to be labelled a shoegaze band, and the Kevin Shields-esque whammy bar wobbling and effects-pedal fetishism shoe fits on Never Lose That Feeling and Rave Down. But between Franklin’s sparkly jangling and lead guitarist Jimmy Hartridge’s velvety power chords, you’re reminded that Swervedriver always felt much more allied with US alt-rock and the slanted, noisy melodicism of Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth. On the King Tut’s mezzanine, mixed verdicts on the show are framed in physical responses. Where one man falls asleep on a bench during the wah-wah wigout at the end of The Birds, another rocks his air guitar so hard to the tremendous sludgy riffing thrash of Son of a Mustang Ford that the crowd parts a little in his honour.
• At Fibbers, York, 21 May. Box office: 08444 771 000. Then O2 Academy 2, Oxford, 22 May. Box office: 0844 477 2000. Thekla, Bristol, 24 May. Box office: 0845 413 4444. Bodega Social Club, Nottingham, 25 May. Box office: 0845 413 4444. Arts Centre, Norwich, 26 May. Box office: 01603 660 352. Scala, London, 27 May. Box office: 020-7833 2022. Details: swervedriver.com
