Swervedriver
Spiked Flower
Good Morning!
Today we’re listening to “Spiked Flower” by Swervedriver
When I was in school, I used to find myself playing the role of hype man for various bands I liked.
Once I found one, I was persistent (or obnoxious, depending on your perspective). When Swervedriver released Raise in 1991, it felt revelatory, like a breakthrough. No easy feat in a crowded field of what was the best year ever for music.
Even more so given the then-cluttered mass of what we’d eventually come to call shoegaze. Swervedriver had a harder, more fuzzed-out edge to their sound than, say, Ride or any of their peers did.
Long story short, I loved it, kicked into high gear, and rarely shut up about them.
And then, like many bands from that era, they went silent.
Of course, like many groups from back then, they reunited, reanimated, and started releasing new work. And here I am again touting the band- albeit with a newer, fresher sound.
The fuzz is still there, but there’s more propulsion and less shoegazing. “Spiked Flowers” sounds like a song the Bizarro World version of the Wallflowers might make. That’s not a terrible thing.
Give it a spin, and let me know if they’re worth the hype.
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More:
“Everybody’s Going Somewhere & No-One’s Going Anywhere” takes the form of a dystopian lullaby while “Drone Lover” uses wordplay about technological warfare interspersed with sludge driven riffs to hammer home its sentiment. Elsewhere, “The Lonely Crowd Fades in the Air” provides the axis for a meeting point between The Clash and The Supremes alongside “Spiked Flower” and “Good Times Are So Hard to Follow,” two straight up pop bangers that would be certainties for primetime radio airplay in a parallel universe.
Read the rest of the review here.
Listen:
“Spiked Flower” by Swervedriver | Future Ruins, 2019
Click the record to listen on your platform of choice.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this track!
Thanks for being here,
Kevin—
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Hi Kevin, just catching up on a few posts I saved while on hols, and I really like this Swervedriver song.
They're another group that had passed me by, which I'll need to correct, but it'll have to wait a bit as I've now got a 'Chalenge 69' chapter to get edited/posted in the next five days!
Tim
Worth the hype! Makes me think of Dinosaur Jr.