Once upon a time in the land of San Francisco (1989, to be exact), there was a band called Swell. Those were heady times, they were. Grunge was still underground, and the Pixies were making a racket all the way across America from Boston. Swell managed to hear some Pixies records, and it forever changed the way they played music. At least, that's what I'm assuming, since that's the backstory for basically every post-Pixies alternative rock band.

During the course of their career, Swell has been through some rough times (not the least of which was when one of their songs was given inclusion on the Showgirls soundtrack). Their lineup seen several members come and go, many only sticking around for one album. And on Everybody Wants to Know, it's debatable whether Swell is actually even a band anymore. See, they're down to just one guy, longtime frontman David Freel, who plays all the instruments on the album, except for some drums that were laid down by ex-Daddy Longhead (who?) percussionist Rey Washam.

Freel has a subdued vocal style that he likes to self-harmonize with, giving the music a fuller sound. For example, in the opening moments of "East n' West," a couple of David Freels get together and sing, "Crash down the steps like they're magic/ Fuck the pain, 'cause pain's never lasted/ Everything about you was spastic/ Got to pee, and we're stuck in traffic/ Life is short for something so graphic/ And we began to finally grasp it." Not too shabby, eh? Yes? Hey, I never said it was fucking Longfellow, but it's a favorite moment of mine here.

Thankfully, Freel writes some rather engaging music to back up his lyrics, though sometimes he plays it for way too long, like on "...A Velvet Sun," where the outro lasts pretty much indefinitely. That's followed by "Like Poverty," whose verse noise makes it a bit like being followed around by a staticky radio station. But it gets a little clearer in patches, and the acoustic guitar over the top sounds nice enough. Virtually every track on the record fall in a range of about 20-30 bpms, never straying far from that mid-tempo zone where it's impossible to rock, but also hard to get too sappy.

The album gains most of its variety, then, from tweaking the sonics and varying the instrumentation. There's that aforementioned acoustic guitar, ambient keyboards, and little analog synth countermelodies on the instrumental "I Don't Think So," while "East n' West" lays down the distorted guitars and funks the drumming up a bit. A few tracks suffer from some piano overkill, which could have been fixed by simply repositioning a couple of faders on the mixing board.

So, when it all boils down to the whole experience of listening to Swell, how does this latest effort fare? Is it, in fact, swell? Well, it's kind of swell for the most part. The production can be kind of neat, and those analogue synths that pop up now and then hit my nerd zone right where it counts. It's hardly the equal of past efforts like Swell's 1997 high-water mark Too Many Days without Thinking, but it's still an improvement over their last album as a full band, For All the Beautiful People.

Everybody Wants to Know is the kind of album that grows more rewarding the second and third times through, as the subtle hooks gradually sink in. But once those hooks have engrained themselves in those old skullbag, it's pretty unlikely they'll offer anything you can't get from any other anonymous alterna-rock record. For all its nifty accoutrements and production ideas, Everybody Wants to Know is ultimately just a halfway decent affair that would be better if it were shorter. My recommendation to David Freel is to get the band back. They may be hard to work with or whatever, but it would at least lend a spirit of interaction that's sorely missing here.

-Joe Tangari