(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

The Swell from San Francisco were introspective and contorted urban storytellers of the existential anxieties of their era, whose music simmered with depressed moods and neurotic longing.

Swell formed in San Francisco in 1987. The original quartet included David Freel (vocals), Tim Adams (guitar), Sean Kirkpatrick (drums), and Mark Signorelli (bass), but Signorelli was quickly replaced by Monte Vallier (bass), and John Dettman soon joined on guitar.

Swell (Psycho-Specific, 1991 – Badman, 2003) highlights above all the ensemble’s performance talent, expressed not through virtuosity but through luminous intuitions in arrangement, juxtaposition, and the “scenography” of sound. It is not surprising that echoes of carefree Bay Area acid rock often emerge (Get High), while elsewhere (Sick Half Of A Church) the listener is suddenly plunged into the expressionist nightmares of Bauhaus. It becomes difficult to distinguish the hippie mood of a bucolic ballad such as Dan A Son Of God from the eccentric hard rock of the Pixies that informs Stop.
Avant-garde harmonic solutions, freely inspired by archaic blues and country traditions—as in the percussive “train” rhythm and long moans of harmonica in A Town, the rhythmic contrast of acoustic and electric guitar in the symphonic counterpoint of Think About Those Days, or the organ noises and percussion over crowd samples in Yes And No—place them among the most darkly atmospheric musicians (they would be the ideal band for Chris Isaak). Monty Vallier (bass) and Sean Kirkpatrick (drums) form one of the most intelligent rhythm sections, capable of exploiting pauses and attacks in highly dramatic fashion.

Well? (Def American, 1993) is studded with “sound-truths” that further estrange the songs. The songs themselves are, if possible, even more lethargic and hallucinatory, steeped in surreal pessimism, carried by instruments balanced on a very thin (and all the more evocative) thread of rationality. The irregular cadences and futile moon-bound rambling of tracks like Everything suggest a cross between the Rolling Stones and early Pink Floyd. Thus in At Long Last a country rhythm and biting guitar distortion accompany Dettman’s whisper in his slightly hippie delirium. The Pixies-like tribute to imaginative ballads is Down, in which the guitar itself intones the most romantic chorus. A saxophone appears to reinforce the album’s most oppressive atmosphere, that of It’s Okay, immersed in a kind of tribal dance.
Once again, the rhythm section is in the foreground, with the guitar reduced to interludes—however incisive ones—and the vocals often reduced to a dazed moan. Yet Dettman has a unique way of playing guitar riffs: nonchalantly, understated, as if they were not riffs at all but mere background noise. His work on Suicide Machine is spectacular, the existential peak of the collection (“We got nowhere to go / but then nothing is too far”).

At Long Last reappears on the EP Room To Think (Beggars Banquet, 1993), alongside the first official version of Life’s Great and Always One Thing, originally recorded for John Peel in 1992.

41 (American, 1994) indulges in the idea of a sound produced in bleak, depressing environments. Freel, in the guise of the introspective, solitary songwriter (Is That Important) or the drug user trapped in psychedelic vertigo (Don’t Give), is becoming a major modern poet. The single Forget About Jesus, alternating between symphonic electronic grandeur and early Dylan-like grit, proclaims: “Thank God for sin to show the way.” But the group has now lost Dettman, to the detriment of the songs’ dynamism; they now all resemble each other, and the album ultimately feels like Freel’s first solo record.

Too Many Days Without Thinking (Beggars Banquet, 1997) is an equally valid and eccentric work, as mature and moving as the previous ones. Freel is a songwriter in the vein of Mark Kozelek (Red House Painters) and Mark Eitzel (American Music Club). The trio accompanying him is a worthy heir to San Francisco’s psychedelic folk-rock tradition, from Jefferson Airplane to Cathead, with an added stylistic mannerism worthy of a classical composer. Rich in country and blues spices, scratched by subtle electric abrasions, and tinged with unpredictable rhythms, the sound floats through always original and evocative harmonic solutions. The album’s general tone is represented by Syd Barrett-like eccentric nursery rhymes such as Fuck Even Flow and Trip, and their sudden mood swings. But each track is its own story: Throw The Wine drags along in a loose shuffle before spitting out a Merseybeat chorus with vocal harmonies amid a barrage of guitars; When You Come Over carries a love melody on the razor’s edge of a sparse, bizarre arrangement; What I Always Wanted is a subdued ballad sung in a whisper and played in a baroque style over a mellotron, as early King Crimson might have done. Sunshine Everyday closes the work in an impressionistic manner, playing on contrasts between trance-like vocals, tense drumming, the biting twang of the guitar, and the languid phrases of the mellotron.

Worthy heirs to the surreal folk tradition of Catheads and Donner Party, Swell projected an unusual scenographic sensibility into songwriting.

Freel also released the solo album Wendell Davis (2010), credited tp Wendell Davis.