POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Swell Delivers Distinctive Brand of Urban <i> Angst</i>

The San Francisco quartet Swell’s literate, serious press material (they publish their own fanzine, Swollen) makes the point that its music reflects the nature of the band’s neighborhood--the rock-bottom Tenderloin district.

Swell transported a bit of the Tenderloin to the Whisky on Monday, delivering a distinctive brand of urban Angst and dislocation from a stage that was lit with faint red and green tints, like the back corner of some especially unsavory bar. When brighter lights came up a couple of times, it was like dawn breaking after a really bad night.

Like American Music Club, another Bay Area voice of the downbeat, Swell shelves the hard-rocking reference points that are usually used to signify this kind of existential tension. Instead, Swell builds its songs on singer David Freel’s acoustic guitar strums, which are augmented by the rise and fall of the rhythm section and shattered by Niko Wenner’s electric guitar riffing. Freel delivers fragmented, impressionistic lyrics in a twangy, dry drawl--Lou Reed by way of Sonic Youth.

It’s all judicious, deliberate and powerfully moody. Swell doesn’t have the dynamics and stage personality to rate as entertaining , exactly, but these boys know how to give a good taste of their ‘hood.