99th Dream album cover
99th Dream

Swervedriver

1998
Zero Hour

99th Dream completes Swervedriver singer-songwriter Adam Franklin’s transformation from shoegaze-adjacent rocker to one of Britain’s finest melodicists. Sure, 99th Dream is plump with key Swervedriver signifiers, like timelapse drone-rock epics, and guitars so bent they’d put Kevin Shields out of business, but the pop songs here are revelations, “Up From The Sea” one of Franklin’s most kinetic, intricately threaded compositions, “These Times” a lightly breathed three-minute piece of pop candyfloss. It’s just all layered with those guitars – is it true Madonna once said they were the “best guitars in the business”? It should be, because it’s right. A real shame that this album suffered the daft fate of getting temporarily lost in a DGC Records re-shuffle.

Jon Dale

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