This Flag Signals Goodbye

Swearing at Motorists:
This Flag Signals Goodbye

[Secretly Canadian; 2002]
Rating: 7.4
Undisputed king of the lawyer-poets Wallace Stevens might have gotten his clock cleaned by Ernest Hemingway in an embarrassingly brief restaurant brawl, but he only met one abstraction he couldn't whup: everydayness. "The malady of the quotidian," as he called it, reduced life to a nondescript paralysis, as one's routine eclipses the "dumbly pent" self and a universal conveyor belt outpaces one's own drive. This feeling can leave one hankering for the coming afternoon when technology is so extravagant and handy that self-hate and ennui can be cathartically dispatched by committing genocide on a roomful of one's clones.

Somehow, Swearing at Motorists' Dave Doughman finds inspiration in the quotidian; chronicling successions of unremarkable moments as if they were epiphanic is his stock in trade. Cramming fourteen songs into thirty minutes, this latest album's lyrics are impressionistic to the point of seeming like impulsive postcards or manic answering machine messages set to music. Anything can be a song: seeing an acquaintance in traffic, pressing buttons in an elevator, stumbling around drunk, stumbling around stoned, going to a show, watching TV up late-- even leaving the DC borough Adams Morgan warrants an evocative 40-second ditty. A previous album actually boasted an ode to a relationship stunted at an impasse over the work of Robin Williams.

I wanted to know what Doughman's secret was. How did he maintain such a high tolerance for the abyss, for the sound and fury that signify jack-diddly? I stalked Swearing at Motorists for three shows to find out, only to be befuddled by why this band insists on being a rickety two-piece in concert. This Flag Signals Goodbye lays claim to full, multi-tracked walls of competing guitar tones, accompanied by Joseph Siwinksi's dramatic drumming, and keyboards, banjos, and trumpets, next to none of which is harnessed live. Doughman even leaps and slides apoplectically, as if he's hearing more than what's coming through the PA. The third time I saw him, he performed by himself, and I couldn't help but think during his cover of "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" that he was asking for an effing band to spontaneously manifest. He's fascinating to watch, at once:

  • the basement rocker who brings the basement with him
  • the skinny guy just Manson enough to fight you
  • the Angus Young spoof artist Angus Old
  • the unambitious firstborn son who pathologically oversleeps
  • the public access troubadour
  • the clever Bizarro-Jesus lookalike who plays "Galaga" before the performance and asks for mushrooms during it
  • and the show-taping dynamo who makes up songs on the spot about the weather, the bar's neon signs, and bleached-blonde audience members talking too loud on their cellphones ("Daytona Beach is over," Doughman came into the crowd and told her, then sang a song about how he doesn't disturb her job at Whataburger, so why does she hamper his?)

    Doughman hails straight outta the gray, gridded neighborhoods of Pollardville (Dayton), and shares GBV's urge to redeem cotton-mouthed drudgery in imaginative pop drapes. Though his detractors claim to hear an indie-rock Mellencamp, his songs blend elements of an avalanche of impressive touchstones-- most pronouncedly the Meat Puppets, Nirvana, and Jonathan Richman, though "Fan Mail for a Criminal" raucously dips the early Pixies in early Pavement, and "The Real Thing" could be smuggled onto a 764-Hero LP without detection. Many of the tracks are love songs written too late to save anything, as the speaker's general "I" mourns the seismographic arc spent with a (sometimes off-puttingly) specific "you." Reassuringly, some folks can still appreciate affection as being more than misfiltered attention, and can muster belief that love isn't just an absurd ritual concocted to guarantee an audience for one's orgasms.

    Nostalgia is the only thing that stumps Doughman. "I can't seem to think past the past," he sings, crippled when his "mind's in reverse." This sentiment should comfort anyone with a tendency to crawl up yesterday's ass for naptime. After playing an old song at his solo show, he said, without pretense or false modesty: "Huh. I used to be clever sometimes."

    Unless recycled chord progressions or muted string-scraping gets you down, This Flag Signals Goodbye holds up replay after replay, its only fault being that some of the riskily earnest lyrics, if slightly recontextualized (say, if Tenacious D sung them) would be hilarious (Kraft example: "All I want for Christmas is you," etc). This singalong knows that it's slight, even as it skirts the heinous detritus of post-love love and summons the cloud whose job it is to always rain on that one small section of the interstate. Postpone your yammering pursuit of misery with this album that acknowledges its limits when Doughman honors an epidemic of premature conclusions with the refrain "I can't seem to makes these things last."

    • - William Bowers, July 23, 2002