this flag signals goodbye review

review taken from delusions of adequacy

Thomas

The two-piece Ohio collective known as Swearing at Motorists rock anew with perseverance and personnel. This Flag Signals Goodbye waves adieu to former drummer Don Thrasher, and now Joseph Siwinski unfurls a banner of backbeats and banging drums. Have you witnessed a Swearing at Motorists live appearance yet? No, well you should because singer/guitarist Dave Doughman is ... well ... he's nuts is what he is! That's meant to be a compliment and an encouraging word to keep an eye out for Dave coming through your town either with or without Siwinski. Upping the amount of touring he is doing in support of the now available Along the Inclined Plane EP and the soon-to-be-available This Flag Signals Goodbye full-length, both from Secretly Canadian, Dave Doughman is more or less your point of focus whether traveling as Swearing at Motorists or solo.

I kept their earlier full-length, More Songs from The Mellow Struggle, close to me for a while because of its being recorded by Mike Mogis (Mayday, Bright Eyes, Lullaby for the Working Class) and being somewhat akin to what Calexico and Giant Sand were doing for me around that time. Their follow up, Number Seven Uptown, continued to toy with fundamental song craft and everyday-life lyricism, but gone was the experimentation that marked an innovative, not-so-mellow, previous release.

Now with new drummer Joseph Siwinski, SaM toy with all the rock dissonance that a two-person band can muster. Choosing to record this time in Philadelphia with Brian McTear (Matt Pond PA, The Trouble with Sweeney), they continue to write simple and subtle songs that you can hum along with and find humanism in. Starting with a cell phone message introduction before launching into the two-minute drum and guitar rocking number, "I saw you driving downtown with your windows down and you were singing along to your radio / my horn wouldn't blow could not get your attention / it's great to see you around / how long you in town / let me buy you a beer and you can talk off my ear / you've probably got a lot to say," is the opening song's "Over the Middle Bridge" entire lyrical content. Lyrics like that are easily identified with and familiar enough to most listeners. This is the case again for "Borrowed Red Bike" where our song character stumbles "'round Thursday night" and goes "looking for you but you were nowhere in sight" so he or she "had a few drinks" and "down the street a few more" and somewhere along the way "got high in the bathroom." If you can't relate to our friend tying one on and then going to look with an impaired sense of direction for another person (girlfriend, boyfriend, lover, ex-, whatever) on a borrowed red bike before realizing that the person probably isn't even in town, well, your either straight-edge or very religious and god bless ya. The point is, when it finally dawns on our protagonist joyriding aimlessly on a borrowed (stolen?) bike that "you're probably down at the shore," ... the point is the goddamn wall of rock that Doughman and Siwinski punctuate this "epiphany" with. Drunk, high, lost, and now realizing their dilemma, what is one to do?

At a recent live show, it was with stage jumps, scissor-kicks, soaring guitars, solid rhythm, and crashing cymbals that Swearing At Motorists had our friend lifting his feet from the peddles, laughing aloud, and steering in sweeping arches down the street.

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