Adam Franklin

Considering our culture's hyper-speed pace, it's hard to imagine any of today's popular musicians will have a lasting legacy — to say nothing of 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 further 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, abstract psychedelic sound painting and slow-building dynamics, which lend just the right amount of weight to these free-floating introspections.