POP : HEART’S CAPTIVES : Sebadoh’s Songwriters Chronicle Love in All Its Confusing States

If you want to experience romantic agony the safe way--by peeking in on somebody else’s--you could go out and buy all seven volumes of Proust, give up television and hunker down for the next year or so.

Or you could save time and buy a Sebadoh album. Give this Massachusetts band 40-odd minutes (the running time of its latest release, “Bakesale”), and it will give you a world of tunefully wrought obsessing over love’s miseries.

Like Proust, who spread the agony among various characters, Sebadoh divides the labor of depicting love gone wrong. Founder Lou Barlow is Sebadoh’s most prolific writer, but bassist Jason Loewenstein is an able second-chair singer-songwriter who, on “Bakesale,” seems right in tune with his partner’s penchant for self-lacerating introspection and Monday morning quarterbacking of romantic losses.

Both are sensitive souls who want to be worthy lovers but find themselves balked by their own shortcomings and the tough realities of emotional life.

“I only need to feel a balance/I just want to do right by you,” Loewenstein sings on “Careful.” For the most part, “Bakesale” is about how hard it is to gain one’s emotional balance and get a relationship right. Those hoping to find the key to romantic fulfillment should consult Dear Abby or Cosmopolitan. All you’ll get from poor Barlow is confusion--”confusion” being a favorite word as he struggles in his songs to sum up his situation.

While obsessing on their main theme, the Sebadoh men--scheduled to play Wednesday at Cal State Fullerton--keep things interesting by coming at it from various angles. The 15 songs on “Bakesale” give us the hopeful beginnings of love--Barlow’s “Skull” and Loewenstein’s “Got It” are paired back-to-back to provide an emotional peak at the album’s midpoint--as well as its ash-sifting aftermath.

And while Barlow saves his harshest chastisements for himself (“I’m not a good friend, I’m not a friend at all”), he can vent his anguish by dishing it out in ways that some of Proust’s sexually jealous protagonists could identify with: “Don’t leave her alone, ‘cause soon she’ll be tasting the sweet unknown/If it feeds her candy, she’ll follow it home.”

While Barlow and Loewenstein are always worrying about love, either after the fact or in fret-athons over the dim prognosis of a current affair, it’s left to drummer Bob Fay and a breathy-voiced guest singer, Anne Slinn, to capture a moment of languid erotic mystery that reminds us what compels all the fuss in the first place. Their dreamy “Temptation Tide,” the only song not written by Barlow or Loewenstein, puts pure feeling ahead of nervous intellect and allows Sebadoh to cover the important base of romantic rapture.

Musically, Sebadoh is an heir to the unruly Northeastern underground guitar-rock tradition that began with the Velvet Underground in the ‘60s and was renovated in the ‘80s by Sonic Youth.

With Fay providing a more reliable pulse than the band’s previous drummer, Eric Gaffney, the songs on “Bakesale” typically oscillate between steady, reflective thrums and passages of surging alarm.

Loewenstein is the more likely singer to yowl his pain, while Barlow’s Angst is more contained.

Some songs pummel throughout, while others thrum along gently before picking up momentum and intensity. Sebadoh doesn’t mix it up quite as much as it did on previous albums, when acoustic ballads would be juxtaposed with garage-rockers, but there’s enough variety with the two voices and the shifting song architecture to hold interest.

Sebadoh’s prehistory stretches to 1982, when Barlow, now 28, began playing with J Mascis in a band called Deep Wound that evolved into Dinosaur Jr. Barlow launched Sebadoh as an acoustic home-recording side project in 1987; in ’89 he went through a bitter split with Mascis, who had taken over creative control of Dinosaur Jr. The electric version of Sebadoh developed from there, with Gaffney and Fay as interchangeable drummers behind Barlow and Loewenstein.

“Bakesale” is the band’s seventh full-length album, and the third on the Seattle independent label Sub Pop. Sebadoh’s discography also includes releases by a side-project that the prolific Barlow dubbed Sentridoh and extends to dozens of singles and EPs on a variety of small, independent labels.

This haphazard profusion of unpolished, small-label releases obviously hasn’t been tailored for prime marketability, although Sebadoh has gained more attention with each album. Barlow has become sufficiently well-known to be pegged with an image as one of indy-rock’s leading men of melancholy.

If you believe his words on “Together or Alone,” the final track on “Bakesale,” a propensity for romantic brooding has been Barlow’s calling, or his misfortune, but not his chosen angle to gain public attention.

It was never my intention to blindly feed the boy-girl game.

I know romance isn’t everything, but I’m obsessing just the same.

It’s a dirty job, but Sebadoh seems uniquely suited for it.

* Who: Sebadoh.

* When: Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 8 p.m. With Godhead Silo.

* Where: Cal State Fullerton University Center Pub, State College Boulevard and Dorothy Lane, Fullerton.

* Whereabouts: Take the Orange (57) Freeway to Nutwood Avenue; go west to State College Boulevard, then north to Dorothy Lane; turn right and park in lot adjacent to University Center.

* Wherewithal: $10 at door; $6 to $8 in advance.

* Where to call: (714) 773-3501.

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