Whereas this outre mid-album suite appears to have a warping impact on the songs that comply with (just like the Dalí-clock desert-psych vibes of “In My Time”), 99th Dream’s nearer, “Behind the Scenes of the Sounds and Occasions,” locations Swervedriver’s melodic and exploratory instincts in excellent concord as soon as once more, yielding a seven-minute thriller that forges the lacking hyperlink between Daydream Nation and Positively Perhaps. For a few years, this track was presumed to be the ultimate Swervedriver monitor on the ultimate Swervedriver album, the right cap to a roller-coaster profession. After all, that notion modified as soon as Swervedriver returned to the stage in 2008 and began releasing albums once more within the 2010s. Nonetheless, 99th Dream has retained a underdog standing within the Swervedriver discography. It’s all the time been the least seen of Swervedriver’s ’90s releases, no because of its lack of major-label distribution, proudly out-of-step aesthetic, and the truth that the band didn’t even survive its promotional cycle. It’s additionally the one Swervedriver that’s been heretofore unavailable on streaming providers.
However this good-looking three-disc reissue reminds us that, whilst their fortunes have been fading, Swervedriver remained extremely industrious, by no means wavering of their quest for psychedelic rapture. Whereas 99th Dream would possibly’ve sounded standard to former shoegaze heads who have been getting their minds blown by Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, this re-creation features a blistering stay set—recorded that yr at New York’s Mercury Lounge—the place the band toughens up the newer materials p to carry its personal towards sturdy warhorses like “Sandblasted.” At this stage within the sport, Swervedriver have been primarily taking part in to the die-hards, so they might afford to get semi-hits like “Duel” out of the best way early and climax with sprawling, enthralling variations of deep cuts like “Kill the Superheroes” and “Duress.” Because the latter will get sucked into its fuzz-blasted abyss, Franklin begins ad-libbing Bowie’s “Golden Years.” “Don’t let me hear you say/Life’s taking you nowhere,” he repeats—little doubt a helpful self-help mantra for a band that had been overwhelmed down by the business and was summoning the energy to hold on.
But when the Mercury Lounge recording captures one among shoegaze’s strongest bands in its ear-damaging component, the complementary assortment of non-album singles, demos, and outtakes would possibly persuade you that Swervedriver truly aren’t a shoegaze band in any respect, not less than within the trendy sense of the time period. They have been extra like a ’60s psych-rock act armed with ’90s guitar gear. Proper as much as the tip of their preliminary run, they have been nonetheless in search of out novel methods to string pop hooks into trippy textures, yielding the flower-powered flashbacks of “Butterfly,” the musically blissful/lyrically spiteful “Straight Through Your Coronary heart” (aka the 1998 B-side “Hate Yr Variety”), and the amusing sing-speak oddity “Canvey Island Child,” which imagines Jarvis Cocker getting sorted for E’s and whizz and becoming a member of the Stone Roses in response. The latter track would flip up in additional subdued type and with a totally completely different lyrical construction on Franklin’s 2007 debut, Bolts of Melody, and fellow 99th Dream castaway “Carousel Metropolis” would additionally get pleasure from a second life on 2010’s I May Sleep for a Thousand Years, making the bonus-disc portion of this set a bridge between Swervedriver Mk I and Franklin’s subsequent solo endeavors. Taken as a complete, this repackaging of 99th Dream transforms the document from a uncared for emblem of Swervedriver’s demise right into a towering monument—not simply to their well-acknowledged interstellar guitar overdrive, however to their chronically underrated craftsmanship.
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