Swervedriver - Hands
Especially in their early days, but really throughout their career, Swervedriver’s small but devoted cult following prized their singles and EP releases. It was well known that Swervedriver’s B sides were the equal to the songs that made it to their albums, and sometimes even superior. The three non-LP B sides contained on the “Son Of Mustang Ford” CD EP—“Volcano Trash,” “Kill The Superheroes,” and “Juggernaut Rides”—are legendary among fans, and a double-disc retrospective anthology was even named after the latter.
My personal connection with Swervedriver began with the Reel To Real EP. It was one of their first two US releases, and since I was on a high school student’s budget, it struck me as the more attractive purchase. The song that I’d heard on “120 Minutes” (“Sandblasted”), plus three non-LP B sides, for $6. Sold! I loved all three of the B sides, and was especially charmed by “Hands,” which is the most typical Swervedriver track out of the three. Other fans may tell you that it’s also the least distinctive, and they have a point; “Scrawl And Scream” features some excellent, mournful pedal steel guitar, and “Jesus” is a strikingly original interpretation of Lou Reed’s famous ballad. But “Hands” best prepared me for what I would get from other Swervedriver releases, and since it was also my favorite, I feel like it’s the best track to feature here.
Swervedriver were considered part of the shoegaze scene in the early 90s, partly due to their love for guitar distortion and partly due to their Creation Records contract. However, they were heavier and noisier than anyone expected from a band with that unfortunate genre tag. Where a lot of other bands in the scene used guitar distortion to create hazy, ethereal beauty, Swervedriver were far more interested in rocking out. Their closest peer at the time was Ride, but without the harmonized vocals of Mark Gardener and Andy Bell, without the pop hooks and exquisite balladry of a track like “Vapour Trail,” Swervedriver seemed far more rockist than even Ride. The other shoegaze bands tempered their Dinosaur Jr influences with heavy doses of Cocteau Twins; Swervedriver mixed Dinosaur Jr with The Who. You get the point—these guys wanted to rock.
On “Hands,” they do so by taking a page from J Mascis, mixing distorted electric guitars with tracks of jangling acoustics, allowing melody and noise to come through in equal measure. Adam Franklin’s laconic vocals don’t have that much range, but melody is nonetheless communicated, and bolstered by the many harmonizing guitar tracks laid down behind him. On the instrumental bridges between verses, the acoustic guitars dominate, but on the verses themselves, tne noise swells, slowly taking over the foreground until, halfway through the second verse, guitarist Jimmy Hartridge launches into a wah-wah solo even as Franklin keeps singing. This is a trick stolen straight from the J Mascis playbook (see the final verse of Dinosaur Jr’s “Out There”), but Swervedriver put an original spin on it, and it works well.
This noisy solo begins a battle for domination of the track between the acoustic guitars and the effects-laden electric leads, and the two opposing forces duke it out throughout the rest of the song. Swervedriver are smart enough not to completely wipe out the melodic aspects of the song towards the end, and don’t even go for the easy emotional trick of building to a noisy, cathartic climax at the end of the song. Instead, each measure contains something slightly different than what came before, with a melodic lead giving way to screaming distortion and then both dropping out in favor of understated yet undeniably catchy vocal patterns. There are so many subtle variations hidden within this song that it takes a dozen listens to pick them all out. The fact that Swervedriver threw all of this into a song destined for relative obscurity as the B side of a US only EP makes clear the prolific extent of their brilliant creativity.
