Swervedriver's Adam Franklin & The Bolts of Melody are spending the tail end of Septmeber and into October on the road. Tonight finds them not only smack in the middle of their East Coast jaunt, but also at Mercury Lounge in NYC (9/30). Tickets are still available.

Hopewell will support tonight at Merc, and will also play Saint Vitus on 10/19 with Weird Owl, The Main Street Gospel, Nordic Nomadic, and Dead Stars. Tickets are on sale.

All Adam Franklin dates and some video is below.

Continue reading "Adam Franklin on tour (NYC show tonight)"

Tickets are on sale (@ noon) for the Neon Indian show happening at Mercury Lounge in December.

Neon Indian last played NYC during CMJ. This weekend they play in Austin at Fun Fun Fun Fest. Flyer below.

Also playing FFFFest are Fucked Up who play a very big show in NYC on Thursday. Tickets are still available.

Also playing FFFest is Danzig whose only other scheduled show is in NJ in December. Tickets are still on sale.

Tickets are on AmEx presale (@ noon) for the show Devendra Banhart just added at Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Tickets are still available for the show Wolfmother added at Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Tickets are on AmEx presale for the Levon Helm / Okkervil River show coming up at Terminal 5.

Tickets are on sale for a December 15th Retribution Gospel Choir (Feat. Alan Sparhawk of Low) show at Mercury Lounge.

Tickets are on AmEx presale (@ noon) for a January 8th Dutchess and The Duke show at Mercury Lounge.

Tickets are on AmEx presale (@ noon) for a January 15th Joe Pernice show at Mercury Lounge. This is a new date. He was supposed to play the venue this Friday, but that show was canceled.

Tickets are on AmEx presale (@ noon) for the January 22nd Serena Maneesh show at Mercury Lounge.

Tickets are on AmEx presale (@ noon) for a January 5th Adam Franklin (of Swervedriver) & The Bolts of Melody show at Mercury Lounge.

Noah and the Whale play their third of three shows in a row at Mercury Lounge tonight (11/4).

Tonight (11/4) is also the Very Best & Sleigh Bells show at Santos Party House.

Amy Millan of Stars/Broken Social Scene gets to town Thursday (11/5) for a show at Mercury Lounge followed by one at the Bell House. Amy's new video for "Bury This" below...

Continue reading "Neon Indian, Devendra Banhart, Alan Sparhawk, Serena Maneesh, Adam Franklin, Joe Pernice, Amy Millan, other tix"

by Bill Pearis

Australia's shimmering psych-pop band, The Church, are staying busy in their 29th year of existence with a flurry of new releases, a couple of solo projects, and a U.S. summer tour, including a stop at Irving Plaza on July 8 (tickets are on sale).

The band, which still features the founding core of singer/bassist Steve Kilbey, and guitarists Marty Wilson Piper and Peter Koppes (plus drummer Tim Powles who's been with the band since 1994), are set to release their 23rd album, Untitled #23, this month in Australia and will get a U.S. release on May 12. Additionally, The Chuch recently scored a short film, Shriek: An Afterword, based on the novel of the same name. Its soundtrack, Shriek: Excerpts from the Soundtrack, dropped in January, and was the first release on The Church's own Unorthodox Records. Both the new album and the soundtrack also spawned EPs. If that wasn't enough, Kilbey released his seventh solo album, Painkiller, last year and Marty Wilson-Piper just released his sixth solo album, Nightjar.

Opening for The Church on their upcoming U.S tour will be Swervedriver/Magnetic Morning singer Adam Franklin who just released his second solo album, Spent Bullets, on Second Motion Records who are also releasing The Church's Untitled #23.

Full U.S. tour dates, plus some classic Church videos, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Church & Adam Franklin - new albums & 2009 tour dates "

Photos by Tim Griffin

[Swervedriver's] Adam Franklin: Most of the earlier tunes were [Interpol's] Sam [Fogarino]'s, and mostly started with simple guitar lines, to which I would then place chord sequences beneath or counter-melodies on top. Sam also gave me a nine-minute Mellotron jam, which I cut and arranged into a verse/chorus/verse arrangement. I also wrote the lyrics and vocal melodies. Although 90 percent of the lyrics are mine, probably 50 percent of the titles are Sam's, due to the fact that he tends to name his demos. This makes it interesting for me, because the lyrical threads follow paths suggested by the titles. After we established a sound aesthetic, I began bringing in some song ideas to which Sam would add keyboards, guitars, atmospherics, rhythmic patterns.

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Adam Franklin: The live show should be fun. Myself and Sam essentially inhabit the engine room of a kick-ass live unit. The band sounds out-of-this-world after a week or two of rehearsal. Bolts of Melody's Josh Stoddard is on bass; Blasco, who has previously played live with Interpol and Secret Machines is on guitar, melodica and psychedelic banjo; and The Album Leaf's Jimmy LaValle is on keyboards. He was an obvious choice, as Sam and I have both known him separately for some time.

Both of those quotes are from an interview Adam gave to Wired. More pictures from last week's show at Southpaw below....

Continue reading "Magnetic Morning & Springhouse @ Southpaw - pics, setlists"

by Bill Pearis

Springhouse

Before blogs, before the internet as we know it, Jack Rabid was writing up all the shows he attended, the records he listened to, and interviewing his favorite bands. Since 1980 he's been publishing The Big Takeover which started as a Xeroxed 'zine but is now a legit glossy mag, thick as a phone book, and even more crammed with reviews and meaty interviews with some of the biggest indie/alt bands and artists on the planet. The passion (and the encyclopedic knowledge of the staff) makes it such an awesome read to this day.

In addition to The Big Takeover, Jack is also a great drummer. Having played in a number of bands over the years (early '80s punks Even Worse, and more recently Last Burning Embers), he might be best known as one-third of '90s-era trio Springhouse. While lumped in with the then UK dreampop scene (Ride, MBV, etc), Springhouse (Mitch Friedland on treated classical acoustic, and bassist Larry Heinemann) was closer to early-'80s groups like The Sound, The Comsat Angels and The Chameleons, the latter of whom they opened for on their 2002 reunion tour.

Springhouse released two very good, if under-heard, albums on Caroline in the '90s and have been slowly working on a third that will finally see the light of day in October. As Jack wrote on Bigtakeover.com:

"From Now to OK, which we've been working on for the better part of 10 years, is finally finished and will be released in October...on limited edition, 550 copies deluxe Bruce Licher-designed letterpress multi-layered foldout CD art package and free internet digital download, Radiohead-style (i.e. pay what you want!). Then we hit the road!"

That tour is a "Big Takeover Presents" triple bill. Headlining are Magnetic Morning (previously known as The Setting Suns), the "supergroup" (my term) of Swervedriver's Adam Franklin, Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino and Jimmy LaValle of the Album Leaf. I saw them at their debut show back in December and despite a then-dearth of material (they've only got a six-song EP out so far, including three versions of one song and a cover) Magnetic Morning had it together, as you'd expect from a group of pros like this. They've been holed away in the studio all summer so I imagine we'll really find out what MM are all about in October.

Opening the Big Takeover tour is Washington DC's Julie Ocean, which is fronted by two veterans of the '90s DC/Arlington indie scene: Jim Spellman was in Velocity Girl and The High-Back Chairs (and is now a producer for CNN where he recently got Tasered on purpose); and Terry Banks was in Tree Fort Angst, The Saturday People and Glo-Worm. Julie Ocean's debut, Long Gone and Nearly There, is ridiculously catchy power pop.

There are only six dates on the Big Takeover Presents tour as of now, including one at Southpaw in Brooklyn on Oct. 21 which is also the opening night of CMJ. Tickets are on sale.

Adam Franklin has also been keeping busy with his old band Swervedriver and Magnetic Morning's dates are part of a much bigger fall tour. All scheduled stops, and a video, are below...

Continue reading "Big Takeover tour w/ Springhouse & Julie Ocean + other MAGNETIC MORNING (Interpol+Swervedriver+Album Leaf) tour dates"

photos by Chris La Putt

Swervedriver played Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn last night (June 12, 2008). It was their second of two NYC reunion shows. The first was one night earlier at Bowery Ballroom. Bill went to that first show...

...Swervedriver came out and just killed it. Like the last ten years never happened. Jaw-droppingly, why-aren't-you-still-a-band-and-making-records good. And maybe it's just the decade that's passed, but they almost seemed better than I remembered. Swervedriver's sound hasn't dated I don't think -- it's the sound of vapor trails off hot desert pavement, or after-burners on a spaceship. On songs like the slow-burn "Duress" it felt like gravity lost its grip on us just a little bit. The band was clearly into it as much as the crowd. Adam Franklin is a cool dude, looking more like Geoffrey Wright having long-since shaved off his signature dreads, and didn't say more than ten word to the crowd the whole show but he had a smile on his face every time he did....

More pictures from the Brooklyn show below...

Continue reading "Swervedriver & Longwave @ MHOW, Brooklyn, NY - pics"

by Asa E

DOWNLOAD: Swervedriver - Mars (Tramps, 07.16.1997) (MP3)
DOWNLOAD: Swervedriver - Cars Converge On Paris (Maxwells, 10.31.1998) (MP3)

Swervedriver @ Coachella 2008 (more by Ryan Muir)

As previously, previously, and previously noted, legendary shoegazers Swervedriver are back. Their recent performance at Coachella was an 'artistic triumph,' according to the LA Times, which makes their upcoming dates (see below) all the more enticing. In the following interview, singer/guitarist Adam Franklin relates his desert island pedals as well as his distaste for the MySpace "shoegaze" category.

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When I listen to Raise, I hear a lot of Dinosaur Jr. worship going on. You guys really work the guitar effects (wah pedals especially) and your vocals are buried. Any accuracy to this perception? And why is your singing so low in the mix?

Adam Franklin: Dinosaur were a big influence around the time of You're Living All Over Me and Bug, for sure. I don't really know why the vocals were so low but I certainly wasn't that confident with the vocals at the time plus it was also perhaps a prevailing stylistic trend at the time.

Did you receive any vocal training between Raise and Mezcal Head? The your voice is mixed much better and it carries a lot of melody as well.

Actually, I did have one singing lesson that may have been around that time. She was an opera singer and she had a picture of her with Pavarotti on her piano and she had at one time given lessons to Johnny Rotten. At the start of the lesson she got me to reach for my lowest and highest notes and then said "right. I guarantee that in an hour you will be singing 2 notes higher and 3 lower - and she was right.

More interview, as well as tour dates, below...

Continue reading "an interview with Adam Franklin of Swervedriver, tour dates"

DOWNLOAD: Swervedriver - Girl on a Motorbike (MP3)

"U.K. rock act Swervedriver will reunite for a worldwide 2008 tour after a nearly decade-long hiatus. Dates and other details have yet to be announced." [Billboard]

In the meantime, front-man Adam Franklin has been keeping busy, and is playing Mercury Lounge in NYC on October 28th.

Adam Franklin of Swervedriver is playing Hoboken tonight (8/22), and Cake Shop tomorrow. Hopewell play both of those shows too. Hopewell are also playing Kickstock ("the Sunday night Kickball finals") at McCarren Pool on September 9th. It's free. Adam's whole solo album is still streaming HERE. All tour dates below....

Continue reading "Adam Franklin & Hopewell - 2007 Tour Dates, Kickstock"

DOWNLOAD: Adam Franklin - Seize the Day (MP3)
DOWNLOAD: Adam Franklin - Syd's Eyes (MP3)

Didn't see Byrne, Bowie or Reed in attendance at the Wilco concert at Warsaw last week, but Pavement's Stephen Malkmus was spotted, as was the slighly lesser known Adam Franklin. Admittedly I wouldn't have even recognized the ex-Swervedriver shoe-gazing frontman by myself, so I'm glad my friend not only pointed him out, but reminded me that Adam has a new solo album called Bolts of Melody - out 6/26/2007. Further research revealed that you can stream the entire album, and that Adam is playing at Mercury Lounge in NYC TONIGHT (July 2, 2007).

It's also worth noting that Adam has been collaborating with Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino on a project called The Setting Suns.

The Setting Suns will start recording their debut EP (Title TBA) in NYC this June. Among the tracks to be included is a cover of the Kinks' "The Way Love Used To Be", and an "epic" version of "Cold War Kids". Sam intends to play Adam's guitar whenever Adam leaves the room. Release is scheduled for the fall. Further details will be posted as they develop....................The duo met over dinner in NYC last winter, while being introduced by long time, mutual friend, Jack Rabid (The Big Takeover).

All AF tour dates below...

Continue reading "Adam Franklin (Swervedriver) MP3s, album stream & 2007 Tour Dates"