This was the second weekend in a row I found myself in Lee’s Palace — both times, the venue was at capacity; both times the venue had all the air circulation of a Russian steambath. Now, you figure with 600 people buying an average of, say, three drinks a night, business has been pretty good. So with that, we offer this friendly advice to the club: FIX YOUR FUCKING AIR CONDITIONING ALREADY.
So yeah... Swervedriver reunion — woo hoo! During their four-album run in the 1990s, the Oxford quartet were the perennial underdogs of the early '90s Creation Records roster, positioned as they were between the abstract abrasion of My Bloody Valentine on one end, and the populist melodicism of Oasis and Teenage Fanclub on the other. However, among denizens of Toronto — a.k.a. “Wee Britain” — the band’s first local appearance in almost 10 years is no less of an event than My Bloody Valentine's more ballyhooed Ricoh Coliseum reunion-tour stop in September, inspiring an immediate sell-out of advance tickets and impassioned last-minute message-board pleas for spares. And if all you wanted to hear was all of your favourite Swervedriver songs played in perfect wah-for-wah succession — from signatures like “Sandblasted” and “Son of a Mustang Ford” to lesser-known delights like "The Other Jesus" from 1995’s extremely underrated Ejector Seat Reservation — then the wait (and attendant scalper fees) were worth it.
But something was missing — and I’m not just referring to Adam Franklin’s dreadlocks. Not only did the comfortable volume level mean you could safely endure the show without earplugs — once a prerequisite for a Swervedriver show — but the band’s physically reserved performance was less a display of revitalized energy than obliging politeness, graciously treating us to songs we’d never thought we’d hear played live again, but with little to suggest that there’s enough renewed inspiration to carry Swervedriver into the future. The sense of time-capsule nostalgia was no more palpable than during the mid-set airing of their lone North American semi-hit “Duel” — not because it conjured warm memories of that brief moment in 1993 when it felt like Swervedriver might break through, but because it triggered that most anachronistic of displays: a friggin’ mosh pit.