Based in Leamington Spa where The Swaps host a monthly blues club at Temperance, Fast Train is the trio’s debut studio album following the release of last year’s Live At Upton (an EP and with a different five-piece line-up were released in 2012 and 2023) and comes on the back of five nominations in the 2025 UK Blues Federation Awards, including best band and both Best Vocalist and Best Contemporary Artist for singer Beth Brooks. Also playing flute, she is joined by James Knight and vocals, guitar and synth and Adam Phillips on guitar, bass, and piano, the album featuring Ben Haines on percussion.
While tagged as a blues band they are more inclined to the folk blues side of things, something made clear with opener, ‘Spain’, which, penned by Knight with the basic message that “You can run but you can’t hide from the pain you carry inside/Before you know it another day is done/And you’re still standing here/You’ve walked 1000 miles and another day is done”, is a lightly fingerpicked number that gradually builds to add percussion and take on a more robust and layered sound.
A joint Knight/Phillips composition, anchored by spare acoustic bass notes with a slow sway rhythm and ruminatively fingerpicked acoustic, ‘Fish’ is a breathily sung song about deceit, disillusion and disappointment (“Your daddy tells you this is how it is, but your daddy is a liar/That old boy’s not even clever….You could have had the sunshine, but you kept on digging deeper/All of your plans failed to deliver…find yourself a new friend, I’ve got nothing left to give/We could have lasted 1000 years/But you tore me down, you wore me down, you killed everything that you love…Crawl back in your hole and shiver/There are no fish in the river any more”).
The first of four penned by Brooks, ‘Sweetheart’ with its dappled guitar and bass is a solid spotlight for her powerful husk and honey voice that carries traces of a less bellicose Joplin, Thea Gilmore and Tracy Chapman as she pleads “Could you ever learn to love someone like me”. A second follows with the soulful folk stripped back, circling fingerpicked and piano tinted ‘Echoes’, one of several standouts with its broken relationship regret lyrics (“Did you hear the whimper of words I couldn’t say/They’re in my head/No they won’t go away…Silence/Then it breaks…Shatters the ceiling/Sometimes I’m OK/I think I’m healing now”).
It’s back to Knight for ‘Shadows’, one of the album’s bluesier moments with its bass, noodling guitar and Brooks digging into Bessie Smith echoes to underscore the darkness lurking in lines like “I feel like a shark in a cold dark sea/Kill what I want and go where I please” but balanced by the more positive “I’ve been fighting all the wrong wars/I’ve been keeping all the wrong scores/But if you can smile, I can smile too/And we’ll dance with the shadows”.
One of the live album highlights, the title track is the sole contribution from Phillips and lies firmly in fingerpicked folk territory, Brooks conjuring thoughts of Elizabeth Cotton singing the similarly-but more downbeat – themed ‘Freight Train’. Slap percussion carries the rhythm for Knight’s ;Scars’, the strongest of his tracks, Brooks in swaggery Bobbie Gentry mood for a song about toxic relationships and emotional and physical self-harm (“the only reason that I get this far/Find someone to give me some scars/Got my first when you left me, second one to hide the first/Hurt myself to ease the pain, and I kept on doing it again and again/Until I got no room on my battered old skin for any more of these wounds/Ran out of blood and enemies, and it’s time I ran out of this room”).
A joint composition by Brooks and Knight, the lilting lullabying ‘Nothing’ is a gentler, dreamy love song (“I’ll be the queen, you’ll be the knight/Although it’s wrong, yet it feels right/Now everyone near us, hear the words they say/And we’ll let them whisper, we’ll let them whisper/And we won’t hear nothing at all”) is followed by her penultimate ‘All You Do’ (“I don’t wanna look at you boy no never gonna let you lie/Lying’s all you do”) a rhythmically itchy, drawled Southern blues that showcases the dynamic flexibility of her range and shares its musical DNA with The Isleys’ ‘It’s Your Thing’.
It ends with Knight singing lead, Brooks on harmonies, on his self-penned ‘Wolf’ with its circular melody, chiming guitar notes and keys and another lyric of a burned relationship (“Where’d you go? Thought you’d stick around”) and a desire to keep the flame burning (“Wish I was a wolf, I’d hunt you down/Wish I was a witch, I’d put a spell on you”).
Fast Train is a hugely impressive debut that shows The Swaps are as accomplished in a studio as they are on a stage and with Brooks clearly a star in the making, next year those nominations should easily translate into wins.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.theswaps.co.uk
‘Echoes’ – live:
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