3 out of 5

Label: Swearing at Motorists

Produced by: Phil Mehaffey

There’s a fair amount of effusive praise out there for Swearing at Motorists’ More Songs From the Mellow Struggle.  Having gotten into the band from the preceding album – Number Seven Uptown – I was definitely on board for the praise, taking to the disc’s simple, stripped down, guitar pop tunes and lost-love lyrics, but time would end up spinning Number Seven much more frequently in my player than Mellow Struggle.  And, as has ought been the case with me, revisiting this album after a long while suggests why: it is so very easy, with SAM’s short song runtime, to get distracted by how front-loaded the disc is with better work.  Guitarist / vocalist Dave Doughman pretty much always writes in sketches, both lyrically and musically, and Number Seven took advantage of that to the utmost, sequencing more fleshed out feelings and tracks around noodling, with tales of drinking and girls stacking up to appropriately paint a picture of loneliness.  More Songs From the Mellow Struggle, though, never quite feels like it completes any given thought; momentum is broken up by the noodling instead of connected by it, and the latter half of the album – after notable centerpiece Telford to North Main – feels hardly there, despite track times increasing.  It’s as though Doughman and drummer Don Thrasher exhausted themselves on some of the solid opening rockers, leaving the disc’s latter half feeling rather wandering.  And unfortunately, once this duality becomes clearer after a couple of spins, the first half of the disc starts feeling weaker as well, that ‘sketch’ concept not backed up by anything to finish the picture.

There are instantly recognizable, catchy, SAM-type blasts on the disc, and from a song perspective, it adds its fair share of goodness to the group’s catalogue.  But as an album, the experience doesn’t make the most lasting impact.