Shifty Disco
Toshack Highway - Birdsong EP - part two
2 tracks plus EP artwork
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Adam Franklin, singer, guitarist and main songwriter for Oxford-originated, London-based Swervedriver, the Creation Records grunge / shoegaze / just-guitars-coming-at-you-from-all-angles rock'n'roll band, has explored a number of different stylings under the name Toshack Highway since Swervedriver "went into orbit" circa 1999.

Taking in keyboard–led electronica, psychedelic acoustic guitar picking, instrumental Spaghetti Western-type flourishes and just a sprinkling of electric guitar explosions over three official releases, full-length eponymous debut Toshack Highway, the Everyday, Rock'n'Roll Is Saving My Life EP and split album Magnetic Morning have all garnered favourable-to-ecstatic reviews.

A fourth full-length retrospective entitled Everyday, Rock'n'Roll Is Saving My Life Vol2 spanning 10 years of odds and ends, demos, works-in-progress, live versions, re-workings of Swervedriver tunes and four track recordings can be purchased at www.toshackhighway.com.

A new full-length album Bolts of Melody has been committed to tape. Recorded with a full band in Toronto and mixed in Cardiff it pulls together a lot of these disparate strands to make the most-fully rounded post-Swervedriver release so far.

The spaceman voice from the 2000 debut reappears on one track, still strung out in heaven like Major Tom but with more electric guitars around him this time; another tune possibly sounds how Air might on Christmas morning, if they were jamming with headphones on to their new Jimi Hendrix stocking-fillers and then there are a number of psychedelic'n'country-tinged tunes that lurch from speaker to speaker before disappearing off into the ether on some more fiery pieces.

The four tracks featured on this Shifty Disco Download Club release are radically different versions of two songs that are both on the new album.

PART ONE: 10th February 2006
The opening version of Birdsong is the one to be found on Bolts of Melody and takes the dynamic thrust of The Velvet Underground's Guess I’m Falling In Love and flies out over the rooftops on it and even finds time for not one but two demented solos of unbridled, joyful distortion. Next up: a live version of Theme From LSD recorded as a five piece T-Highway in Toronto last November. This tune was originally composed during a soundcheck in Milan in 2000 by Adam, Swervedriver bass player Steve George and Toshack drummer Jeff Townsin as a 'sideways waltz' and has grown ever more off-kilter over time.

PART TWO: 17th February 2006
The second 'moonshiner version' of Birdsong strips the song down to acoustic guitar and voice and is delivered in a melancholic folk-style complete with ominous thunderclaps. Finally Theme From LSD 'baroque version' employs strings and piano and transforms the sideways waltz into something more stately that you might expect to hear as part of the score of an incredibly cool French b-movie.