Swirl – Dead Vibrations (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Some time ago, out on a dark, lonely highway, an illicit meeting between the then members of My Bloody Valentine and Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster met to discuss the matter of who would inherit the throne. They came up with the idea of uniting their two houses, Shoegaze and Neo-psychedelia and the chosen heir was the, now of age, Dead Vibrations. Okay, that’s almost certainly not true, maybe I have been watching too much Game of Thrones but it does tell you a lot about the musical balance of the band.

On the one hand they play with sullen, shoegazing washes and walls of deconstructed noise, on the other they have the ability to hit the full on rock button and reign down shards of dark and jagged guitars. They hide the songs structures and indeed much of the vocal delivery under swaths of pulsing bass, dramatic beats and meandering, white-hot riffs. The result is a wandering, hypnotic noise-opera, aptly called Swirl, which comes packaged with an even longer, more languid and sleazy piece called Sleeping in Silvergarden, which as we all know is a city in Dorne. See, I knew I was on to something!