Swell – Too Many Days Without Thinking – Review

Swell

Too Many Days Without Thinking (Beggars Banquet)
by Barbara Restaino

Imagine finding yourself floating in the ocean, just past the break, where rhythmic swells roll underneath your body – you’re dreaming. You dive under the surface and discover a shadowy rootless world; but the current propels you upward, and when you resurface, waves crash on your brain, and you rage with it, sway with it. You return to consciousness, wiping the crust from your eyes, and like any good dream, you wish you could go back to it. So you put Swell in your CD player and realize they can take you there.

Three years after the release of 41 (American), the San Francisco-based Swell is back with their fourth full-length release, Too Many Days Without Thinking. During the interim between albums, the band and a few of their songs appeared in a Showtime feature, Duke Of Groove, and they recorded a creepy cover of “Golden Years” for Crash Course for the Ravers: A Tribute to the Songs of David Bowie.

On Too Many Days…, Swell sketches a guitar-driven, moody atmosphere, adding layers, then taking them away. The words, embedded in David Freel’s smooth, low voice, mingle with saturated basslines. Meanwhile, guitar riffs flood your ears with throbbing droplets, and all of this is contained, so as not to make a mess, by minimal drum beats.

Preserving the balance between melancholy and fury, the first song, “Throw the Wine,” starts off slow and rhythmic, then the chorus kicks in with a quicker tempo and distorted guitars; and just as abruptly as they bring it up, they take it back down, then up again, until the two meet – not in the middle, but at both extremes. They use a similar technique on “What I Always Wanted,” alternating between an intense, hollow feeling of hold-your-breath-anticipation reminiscent of the Jaws theme and a relieving acoustic melody. Rather than using the chorus to rehash or magnify the song’s mood, Swell uses it to reveal an opposing emotion.

Swell’s lyrics are interesting and thoughtful, bordering on depressing, but never causing depression. Example: on “At Lennie’s,” Freel sings, “God loves you, and I hate that, and I’m wishing sin, tomorrow/And we’re aimless, and not chosen, and we’re laughing/Don’t mention why, don’t feed that cry, I own the words you only borrow.” Too Many Days… is as much about lyrics as it is music. It reminds me of the movie Eddie and the Cruisers when Eddie crosses his fingers to show how words and music go together. “Words