Prick Tunes: Toshack Highway "Board the Bullet Train"

While brushing up on my shoegazing history for last Thursday's Ride post, I was reminded of an album I used to own and had long since forgotten, Toshack Highway's self-titled LP. Toshack Highway--whose name was derived from roughly combining the surnames of two Liverpool FC players from the 1970s--was the brainchild of former Swervedriver lead singer and guitarist Adam Franklin. If I ever knew that fact at one point, I had surely forgotten it between then and now, when I stumbled across their name while reading about the flitting existence of the movement to which Swervedriver was attached of at the turn of the 1990s.

Toshack Highway seemed to seek to merge the effects-laden guitar work so central to the shoegaze movement with the more contemporary electronic flourishes with the added twist of feeding a Moog through the guitar effects pedals. Their first album was one I never soured on, but eventually fell by the wayside and made its way to the used CD store at some point when I was sorely lacking in liquidity. Hearing "Board the Bullet Train" again while poor by reasons I'll refrain from boring you with hearkens back memories of walking into Cheapo with an impossibly tall stack of dusty CDs with the unrealistic hope that somehow these 23 discs would yield more than $35, the amount of money I'd be needing to deposit into my checking account to make rent.