Album Review: Swervedriver – “I Wasn’t Born to Lose You”

Swervedriver is one of those bands that emerged during the early 90’s when the shoegaze craze was at its peak. Although almost no one knows about them as they were shadowed by the likes of My Bloody Valentine and Ride, they released some critically-acclaimed stuff in their prime. Mezcal Head was the first album I heard from them and everything in that reeks of the Grindy Nineties, with intricate bass lines, outros that seem to go on forever, songs of love, drugs and government, everything. I Wasn’t Born to Lose You is their first album in 17 years and comes riding the wave of alt-rockers calming down, but letting their songs age like wine.

While their power on Mezcal Head and Raise was something to be admired, what they did with that vigor was something of a miracle. The combination of vocalist Adam Franklin’s almost apathetic voice and the high energy of the instrumentals thrashing away with feedback and gusto is what makes this different from the stereotypical shoegaze band. However, this album is more of a callback to times that were once grungy and dirty, a callback that only lasts about 6 songs in before falling off into the inevitability of age.

The cleanliness of the album does bring the 90’s band into the 21st century of production, however it loses it’s charm and edge. What made Mezcal Head so good was the grind of everything and the limitations of production at the time. The instruments seemed heavier and fuller by comparison to many of the comeback albums of today. There is no “Blowin’ Cool” esqe track here, nothing that’s very ambitious in it of itself. The most the album changes is in the tracks “Everso” and “Red Queen Arms Race”, which tries to be as grindy as it can, but it’s a processed fuzz and feels manufactured. None of the songs are really warm in terms of their effects, and the plethora of effects used on previous albums are shorn down to maybe 4.

The album isn’t all bad as I make it out to be. “Autodidact” is my favorite track off the record and is an instant classic. It was the taste that not everything that is clean from them has to be a sub-par track. “Everso” returns to the grind with a long, somberly track that increases in ferocity everso (ha, get it) slightly to a pounding climax. “For A Day Like Tomorrow” sounds more like a Swervedriver track, it’s got that 90’s tempo to it sounding like a love child between the English bands of the era and Dinosaur Jr.

There are some gems on this album, but the disappointing outweighs the good in this case and didn’t leave me with my musical fill. This is more so a textbook example of when you should increase production value and when you shouldn’t. If this was the final release for these guys, I wouldn’t put it against them. In fact, it’s just one of those albums I would forget that I had on my iPod.