this flag signals goodbye review

review taken from amazon.com

Rock and roll, pure as it can ever be

Swearing at Motorists are the masters of seeming simplicity... maybe true simplicity. They may not be the first act to discover that, in the era of recorded music, there is no longer any need for songs to have repetitive choruses that can be picked up in one listen-through. And yet they just might be the first ones to apply the finding to rock and roll while staying within a true rock and roll ethic.

The typical deviant from verse-chorus-verse structure is a graduate of having written (many) verse-chorus-verse songs. This songwriter may escape his habits, but it's rarely by simple removal of the repetitive elements of the song -- instead he substitutes variations on the tempos, melodies, riffs, words, and rhythms established at the outset a song. The extension of the song -- being the aspect in which the song differs from other songs -- becomes the essential element. And so it is that everything viscerally unnecessary to a pained soul that picks up a guitar comes to dominate -- and that we have experimental composition masquerading as rock and roll.

In the future of rock and roll channeled by Dave Doughman, it's verse-chorus-... end. The listener is never subjected to a second verse that's a dry, dispassionate variation on the first. What remains desperately vital may only be eighty seconds' worth, but so be it: on to the next vital eighty seconds. A dozen or so tracks later, you haven't wasted *any* seconds. And five listens later you may start thinking of the album as one big composition, and you start thinking that complexity may not have been sacrificed at all, and that maybe passion and sophistication are not opposing forces, and that it's odd that you are feeling again.

(Then when you see the Motorists live, you may find yourself wanting to personally make sure that Dave Doughman never comes in harm's path, because you may be suddenly overcome by a strong sense of the urgent necessity that the artistic inspiration he embodies never be extinguished by mere vagaries of existence on this damned planet. Or you may just notice that he rocks hard.)

--jason j briggeman

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