There's something about suburban basements that breeds intimate, warm, miserably hopeful singer/songwriters. They come to the surface from time to time offering heartfelt, stark, quirky four-track demos to the world. With his early odd homebrew,
Beck
was a pioneer of the recent era, and Canadian gloom-folkie
Hayden
and
Palace Brother
Will Oldham
have continued down a similar road. They all make recordings that offer a private snapshot of fragile psyches and inner maladjustment. Now,
Swearing at Motorists
from Dayton, OH, exudes this same subterranean feel. On their second major release
Number Seven Uptown
, drummer
Don Thrasher
(
Guided by Voices
) and singer/multi-instrumentalist
Dave Doughman
punch through 15 short songs about TV shows, talking on the phone, and unrequited love. Richly layered and overdubbed with dissonant harmonies, the songs are striking in the way that
Doughman
doubles his vocals, producing a lo-fi version of the kind of high harmony one might hear in Irish folk (or perhaps similar to how it might sound if
Built to Spill
covered an entire
Varnaline
album). The heavy-rock sea shanty
"Flying Pizza"
and the
Tortoise
-influenced
"Talking Pictures"
capture the diverse songcrafting of this team, and the bouncing horn section on
"Calgon Take Me Away"
brightens what would otherwise be a crushingly depressing song. Released in late 2000 on
Secretly Canadian
records,
is like finding a long forgotten crate of
Dylan
records in your mom's basement. ~ Zac Johnson