Seventeen years separated the end of Swervedriver’s first run and their 2015 comeback effort, I Wasn’t Born to Lose You, but it’s not as if fans of the Oxford shoegaze pioneers were lacking for cosmic-pop thrills in the interim. After the group disbanded at the end of 1998, singer-guitarist Adam Franklin barely give his amps a chance to cool down before resurfacing with Toshack Highway, which represented both a more experimental and chilled-out antidote to his former band’s sense-obliterating squall. Once that project dissolved, he returned to his comfort zone on his 2007 solo debut, Bolts of Melody, which effectively reimagined Swervedriver with less flange and more jangle. That album title then became the name of his backing band: from 2010 onward, he released albums as Adam Franklin & the Bolts of Melody. Now, with Swervedriver’s second act seemingly on pause after 2019’s Future Ruins, Franklin is embracing the Bolts branding once again—but in this case, he’s reviving an old name to signal a new direction.
On Film Noir, the Bolts of Melody moniker stands on its own. If Franklin’s name is no longer at the top of the marquee, it might be because he’s not really playing the role of frontman here. While Film Noir features several recurring players (including Locksley Taylor of Southern Ontario shoegaze faves Sianspheric, Swervedriver drummer Mikey Jones, and the late Josh Stoddard, who contributed to the record prior to his death in 2021), the album reintroduces Bolts of Melody as an amorphous recording collective. Its ranks have expanded to include Franklin’s heroes (J Mascis), his spiritual progeny (Montreal space-rockers the Besnard Lakes), and even a former EastEnders cast member (UK actor/singer Sukie Smith), among others. While the aesthetic is still plenty psychedelic, this iteration of Bolts pulls from a broader palette of sounds and instrumentation—from vibraphones to electronics—to achieve the desired otherworldly effect.
Across his many bands and projects, Franklin’s cool, melodious voice has always been the focal point, but on Film Noir, he greets us more or less to say goodbye. The opening “555” marks one of the few times you hear him sing on the album, and even here his minimal, mantric vocal is but another texture in a lushly layered cosmic fantasia that more readily conjures the magisterial psych rock of Dungen and Lonerism-era Tame Impala than Franklin’s fuzz-pedaled past. As the Film Noir title strongly suggests, these 12 (mostly) instrumental vignettes were envisioned more as cinematic scores than proper rock songs. But if the songs are meant to conjure soundtracks to ’70s Euro sci-fi flicks and spaghetti westerns that don’t exist, listening to the album feels a lot like channel-surfing through B-movies at 3 a.m., stopping just long enough to get a snapshot of a film’s vibe before flipping over to the next one: “The Village Sleeps” summons all the pomp and circumstance of a royal parade in 38 seconds flat; “Harpsiglass” takes little more to show you what Pet Sounds might have sounded like if were made for a Sergio Leone film.
Film Noir throws so much at you in such short spurts—kosmische trap beats one moment (“Vibratune”), Air-like prog-lounge with spoken-word the next (“Suzuki’s Dream”)—that the album can feel less like a unified statement than an audition reel for a music-supervision company. But when they give themselves more than 90 seconds to breathe, Bolts of Melody can offer more than mere bursts of moods. Dub vignette “Cops Raid Easy’s” deftly balances jazzy elegance with suffocating intensity, while “Black Flower” showcases the group’s collaborative frisson at peak strength: its Floydian synths trigger a dramatic, castle-storming march, guided by Smith’s wordless vocals and Mascis’ shredding. Yet even when his mic is switched off, Franklin’s melodic instincts are ever present. The Neu! Order motorik cruiser “Hi-Rise Decade” is so pretty and precise, you might wonder why Franklin didn’t just top it off with a proper vocal hook. But like true cineastes, Bolts of Melody understand that when a scene is so carefully set, adding anything more would just clutter up the shot.
