Swervedriver, Sci Flyer.
“There’s no coke to stoke my fire, but it’s a nice neck of the woods all the same.”
That’s what I’m talking about.
And because, even after all of my orgasmic babblings about Swervedriver in the past, it is actually this song that is my favorite of all their songs (OK OK I may eventually say that about another song on some other day… give me a little leeway on this one) we’re going to talk about it for a minute.
The intro is what really makes this one. Specifically the drumming in fact, which makes me sorta sad that first LP drummer Graham Bonnar left the band soon after Raise was recorded. Maybe it’s his drumming that gives Raise the slight edge over other Swervedriver albums that makes it my favorite of all of their recordings. If you add in the dozen or so B-sides from the same period, I think it overshadows all of the work they did afterwards. This song is a great example of why that is.
Listen to the evolution that the drum parts on this song go through in the one and a half minutes before the first verse starts. At the very beginning of the song, Bonnar is pounding on his toms as Franklin and rhythm guitarist Jimmy Hartridge chug fearsomely, but as soon as Franklin stomps on his wah-wah pedal and sends a jolting screech of lead guitar across your speakers, Bonnar goes into a frantic snare roll that mingles with the wah-wah and hints at some kind of sonic collision. Both Franklin and Bonnar hang back once the first real riff of the song gets going, but they’re just biding their time, Bonnar playing a simple 4/4 beat and Franklin feeding back quietly for the first few measures. When he stomps on his wah-wah again, it’s on for real, and here’s where what Bonnar is doing really gets interesting. He starts throwing in more snare hits, picking up on that rave influence that was floating around amongst the DNA of the entire British alt-rock scene in the early 90s. Then he starts ending each measure with a huge snare fill, which he has soon expanded to take in the rest of his kit as well. By 50 seconds into the song, Bonnar is spending the majority of each measure raging wildly across his drum kit, hitting every drum and cymbal he has available in rapid succession. All of this wild percussive exuberance both mirrors and furthers the steadily increasing funnel of out-of-control white noise that Adam Franklin is extracting from his overdriven amplifier, and he and Bonnar seem on the edge of making the whole track explode before it even gets going—that is, until 50 seconds in, Bonnar, Hartridge, and bassist Paul Wilson all stop playing, leaving Adam Franklin to play the song’s main riff all by himself for 5 seconds. The overall feeling is that the listener has just plunged off a cliff.
And then the rhythm section kicks back in, with Hartridge and Wilson filling in the riff behind Franklin as Bonnar switches from his previous frantic beat to a cruising half-speed rhythm that continues to place an elaborate fill at the end of each measure but somehow makes both that fill and the song as a whole sound serene instead of frenetic. It’s as if the band drove their speeding muscle car off a cliff, but instead of falling to their deaths, the car sprouted wings and soared into the sky.
All of this has happened in the first 90 seconds of this five-minute song, and there’s still an entire three-minute pop song’s worth of awesomeness left to go. After that intense an introduction, the awesomeness of the main song feels less like the point than a bonus, like the band knew that the intro was rad enough that they could coast through the rest of the song but decided to go all out anyway. Unlike a lot of the other songs on this album (and for the record, they are ALL about driving), “Sci Flyer” presents driving as an end in itself, rather than an escape from bad things waiting at home. This gives it a much more upbeat feel than most of the album, and no, it’s not because of the coke that indefensible mentions above. I hope I don’t ruin the song for him by saying this, but the line is pretty clearly “No coal to stoke my fire but it’s a nice neck of the woods all the same.” The next few lines make it clear that the driving in this case is not just done by humans. “This is where they came down to our planet, checking on our climate and our women too.” Were Franklin and the boys driving out to meet the aliens this time? It’s a better reason to get behind the wheel than to run away from your problems, and meeting aliens will never be a letdown. Plus, maybe they’ll take you away from all this to somewhere better. Or at least provide the inspiration for a fucking sick wah-wah guitar solo.
