SWA - XCIII - Cassette

SST Records

Guitar goddess Sylvia Juncosa was a splendid player, but her arrival in SWA just before this album was recorded may have contributed to the eccentric mishmash of styles on XCIII. Her quick-fingered, discordant soloing meshes oddly with the dirgelike tempos that the rest of the band favors on most of the album, though admittedly the combination works on cuts like "Prayer" and "Optimist." The place where everything comes together is the soaring anthem "Arroyo," the only fast-paced number on the album and the one where Juncosa sounds unleashed. "Merrill Ward" does the best singing of his career, belting out the verses with feeling and holding the final note of each chorus for an improbably long time. It helps that "Arroyo" was probably also the peak of the band's songwriting, making this a great single but causing the rest of the album to look unfocused and draggy by comparison. The band and label obviously recognized the superiority of the song, as Chuck Dukowski went back into the studio and produced a slightly cleaner edit which was re-released on an EP. That version of "Arroyo" was a minor college radio hit, and much was expected of SWA afterward. Unfortunately, Juncosa left the band and was replaced by Phil Van Duyne, and the band's subsequent releases had nothing that equalled the energy of "Arroyo," much less surpassed it.

Track Listing
Fakers Blues
Optimist
Succumb
Heartbreaker
Arroyo
Prayer So Long