Pitchfork

It was at least four years ago when I first caught Dave Doughman's two-man operation Swearing at Motorists, the first of three bands on the bill, playing to a mostly empty London club. Doughman's wiry enthusiasm and exaggerated crooning was met with indifference, and as a last-ditch effort, he pulled out a song that he "wrote during his boyhood days in Manchester." His languid, skeletal cover of "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want" just...bombed, spectacularly, worse than any supposed crowd concession I'd seen before. A few two-minute tracks, half-hearted yowls, and overcompensating heel-clicking leaps later, Doughman and his drummer receded from the stage to little fanfare.

I admired Doughman's chutzpah enough to pick up the band's surprisingly consistent This Flag Signals Goodbye, to stick with it through to the solipsistic slow numbers to blare its scrappy, unadorned anthems. The follow-up is Last Night Becomes This Morning, and it's armed with a bevy of clever song titles and an intertextual suggestion from Doughman likening the record to a struggling indie musician's Running on Empty, songs about maintaining the touring-band lifestyle in the face of apathy. While I'd love to say this is the album that breaks the holding pattern, Last Night holds a palm full of surprises and otherwise stretches the underdog charm a little thin.

The only atmosphere Last Night conjures is isolation; the only emotional setting is defeat. Hell, it opens with a song called "Losing the Battle, Losing the War". Even numbers that run up the party flag, such as "Waterloo Crescent", sound deflated somehow. If you're gonna set yourself up to love this record, you'll have to bring considerable patience and savor every small detail Doughman tosses out as lifelines to his songs. Dig the vintage organ tones, the sneaky 10-second pre-chorus on "Timing Is Everything", that song's trumpets and piano-- always one at a time, however, as if he's sprinting across the studio to finish each part.

Still, "Timing" is the closest to a full band sound that Last Night gets. Most songs are spiced up through either carefully applied double-tracked vocals ("Slave to the Kettle" and the brief but near-perfect lullaby "Done in a Hurry"), or with overbearing empty-studio echo that recall a sparsely attended performance and reinforce the crushing loneliness of life on the road, maaaaaan ("This is Not How Forever Begins", "Time Zones and Area Codes", and "Ten Dollars").

Which is fine; I couldn't think of an approach that suits Swearing at Motorists better. This Flag Signals Goodbye had songs, though, with arrangements and melodies that lived and breathed on their own regardless of lyrics. The tracks on Last Night serve the theme before all else and, barring a few bold highlights, skimp on the rest.