With his new band Toshack Highway, onetime Swervedriver frontman Adam Franklin tones down the noise and effects of his former band in favor of shimmering pop songs that occasionally incorporate electronic gadgetry and dusty country-rock instrumentation.
Toshack Highway is the umbrella name for all the projects undertaken by Swervedriver vocalist/guitarist Adam Franklin's since his seminal shoegazer band went on semi-permanent hiatus in the late '90s. Initially Toshack was a trio also featuring Sophia drummer Jeff Towsin and accomplished producer/session musician Charlie Francis on keyboards, bass, and knobs. In this configuration, Toshack released a long self-titled LP in 2000, which extended Swervedriver's paradigmatic swirly pop aesthetic into all sorts of arenas which had been taboo for the old band, including sleepy spaghetti western-ish country-rock, Fahey-esque faux-folk noodling, and bubbling electronic pop. Rather than build on this acclaimed foray into eclectic post-shoegazer atmospherics, however, the next year Franklin released a four-song EP titled Everyday, Rock 'n' Roll Is Saving My Life, also under the Toshack rubric, but this time consisting of his own lo-fi voice/guitar/percussion demos, which sounded to many like dusty old Swervedriver demos.
In 2003, Toshack Highway came back with another release, this one 2CD split LP (Melodic Morning/Aspiring Age) with the Canadian neo-shoegazer group Sianspheric, which Franklin had met while touring Canada in the late '90s. Featuring the return of Francis and Towsin to the Toshack lineup, the five-song Magnetic Morning disc nicely splits the difference between the two previous Toshack efforts. Neither as scattered as the first album, nor as stripped-down as the Rock and Roll EP, Magnetic Morning features insanely catchy hooks, endearingly lazy vocals, and dense, shimmering pop arrangements, nicely consolidating Franklin's other stylistic leanings into a classic and cohesive melodic rock sound. In addition to four attractive new Toshack songs, the EP features a gentle finger-picked version of the epic closer to Swervedriver's last album 99th Dream, "The Sounds and the Times."
