Adam Franklin and Bolts of Melody

Date/Time:Mon., July 13, 9:00pm

Price: $8

Adam Franklin at Firebird

Shae Moseley

Considering our culture’s hyper-speed pace, it’s hard to imagine that even the most popular musical acts of the day will retain much of a lasting legacy -- much less relatively obscure artists like Adam Franklin, who is still best known in most circles for his shoegaze-guitar-wielding with Swervedriver. But Franklin, who has actually entered the most prolific and creatively effervescent period of his career during the last decade, probably deserves just such a legacy. His other projects – the experimental space-folk outfit Toshack Highway and Magnetic Morning, his project with Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino – are stylistically varied, but are always built on the strength of Franklin’s signature guitar-scapes and raspy, melancholy vocal refrains. But on his latest solo album Spent Bullets, he navigates farther away from Swervedriver’s rock bombast and the dense, echo-laden sound-collages of Magnetic Morning. Bullets is full of plaintive love songs built on a foundation of yearning ‘60s soul and mixed with his trademark abstract psychedelic sound painting and slow-building dynamics, which lend just the right amount of weight to these free-floating introspections.