#empty cellar

The man behind SWIFTUMZ is Christopher McVickers, enough of a fixture in the Bay Area’s thriving lo-fi scene to get Kelley Stoltz, and members of the Aislers Set, the Bananas and Dirty Ghosts to come in for a song or two. This is the third SWIFTUMZ album, and it has a certain lived in grace. You can tell that McVickers has found his sweet spot, triangulating between NZ fuzz, melodic garage and 1970s guitar rock; there are some short but stinging guitar solos in several of these blurred and wistful songs.

McVickers has largely seen brevity as a virtue. Most of the songs run one or two minutes, tantalizing with a taste but not sticking around long enough to pall. We are largely in favor of short, memorable songs — you can ask us why after you’ve listened to the Decemberists’ “Joan in the Garden” three times in a row, and no, you may not skip the boring parts — but it must be said that the best cut is the longest one. There’s a lot to love about the nearly six-minute “Almost Through,” from the somersaulting guitar lick that opens it, to the yearning drone of organ that underpins it, to the dreaming, drifting, surf infused propulsion of the thing. It carries you along like a vintage T-Bird on an ocean-facing highway at night, not in a hurry but moving, the end no more important than the right-now middle, which could go on indefinitely, and it’d be fine. 

In fact, maybe we’ll just play that one again.

Cooper’s voice is a delicate instrument, flickering with old-fashioned vibrato and making free with the melody in almost scat-like way. She is apt to slide over half a dozen notes before finishing a line, like a jazz saxophone closing out a late-night gig. Even the bubbliest, most pop intervals have a nocturnal cast to them. Breezy “The Pledge,” with a melody and structure cribbed from “Mockingbird” percolates jauntily atop rackety drums and slanted indie-rock guitar (Cooper plays everything except for drums on one of the album’s nine tracks). Yet there’s a ghostly transparency to the chorus, insouciant as it is, as Cooper flutters disembodied into the high range.

The two most striking cuts are hardly songs at all, but rather spoken word performances with the queasy interior logic of Latin American magical realism. In the “The Hackers,” Cooper slashes away at an autoharp while recounting a story about an ominous treehouse for children only (“It’s bloated and twisted and starting to lean, a condemned Disneyland, a perverted Swiss Family dream,” confides Cooper). The place has a palpable Edward Gorey’s menace to it, yet Cooper recounts tale matter of factly, as experienced by a very young child makes it up to the very top of this unsettling play place and watches a horror movie with one of its residents. The whole thing is odd and disquieting. The first time through, I’d planned to skip it from then on, but it later became one of my favorite parts of the album.

The other spoken word piece is “Borderlands.” This one has more conventional rock band backing—guitar, drums, bass, organ — but is, if anything, even stranger, telling the tale of an undercover man and woman; they live together until an ordinary couple moves in with them, and then, for whatever reason (like a dream, it makes sense while it’s happening), the woman slowly disappears while the man becomes more solid. The image of the woman in the bathtub with her midsection completely transparent, asking “Do you still love me?” is haunting and beautiful, perhaps a commentary on women trying to stay who they are in relationships or perhaps just an oddball fable with no particular moral.

One of the wonderful things about solo projects is that they allow artists to become entirely, eccentrically themselves, without concessions to band members or other collaborators. Grace Cooper has always been an intriguing voice in Bay Area garage rock, but she is odder, more interesting and more beautiful than ever in this collection of songs.