How do you best the anti-guitar-god bluster of arguably the most sonically bold and melodically sophisticated band of England’s shoegaze era? If you’re Swervedriver’s unflappable former leader, Adam Franklin, you don’t even try. You simply work off the various templates for greatness set forth by your former outfit, which, quite frankly, spewed out enough novel ideas to sustain a half-dozen indie-rock careers. Which brings us to Franklin’s latest, I Could Sleep For A Thousand Years (Second Motion), whose initial tracks were hammered out in New York late last year with his newly minted backup outfit, Bolts Of Melody. Sleep is Franklin’s most well-rounded collection to date, balancing the more laid-back guitar balladry and pop sensibilities of his last two solo albums with the ornery, volatile spark of vintage Swervedriver largely missing on those efforts. Franklin will be guest-editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him as well as our 2009 Lost Classics post on Swervedriver’s Mezcal Head.
Franklin: This 1962 b-movie was technically one of the earlier zombie movies, though it was filmed in a kind of film-noir style and has a great soundtrack. Set and filmed in Utah, Carnival Of Souls tells the story of Mary Henry (played by Candace Hilligoss), a young woman who is the sole survivor of a drag-racing pile-up when the vehicle she is in careens off a bridge and into a creek. She emerges dazed from the water, and though she doesn’t realise it at first, she is no longer really with us. A little later, she drives to Salt Lake City to take up a post as a church organist but gets fired by the priest when he comes across her “playing the devil’s music,” seemingly possessed. The eerie and suspenseful (theatre, not church) organ soundtrack, composed by Gene Moore, forms a great part of the ambience of this movie, and I love the scene late on when she runs through department stores and past tail-finned American automobiles to the Greyhound station to get a bus out of town, only to discover she’s invisible and no one can see her. Of course, all the other zombies live out at the deserted fairground—the exterior shots filmed at the famous Saltair Pavilion, an amusement park situated on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, which, when built, was intended to be a kind of Coney Island of the west.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exUFpSFblaw
