Sportsguitar: Wrong is Alright

It must be nice to come from a country far enough removed from the American pop mainstream to be able to appreciate and appropriate -- innocently and unselfconsciously -- the sound and vision of bands like Pavement and Guided by Voices. At least that's the feeling you might get from Sportsguitar, a Swiss group whose unassumingly slanted and noisily enchanting guitar pop draws on the skewed sensibility of what not so very long ago people weren't ashamed to refer to as lo-fi indie rock. Now, of course, that particular mini-revolution is played out, over, passé. But not as far as Sportsguitar (or for that matter, England's Beatnik Filmstars, or Scotland's Yatsura and Bis) are concerned. The Lucerne-based foursome, whose second album, 1996's Married, 3 Kids, is now available from Matador in the US, and whose first, Fade/Cliché, came out last year on the Canadian label Derivative, are still genuinely rattled by the cryptic rush of Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted (Matador, 1992) and GbV's Bee Thousand (Matador, 1994).

Unpoised and unpolished, in front of maybe 75 people, Sportsguitar gradually fell into a stumbling kind of groove last Saturday night in the upstairs room at the Middle East. "It's not our evening," exclaimed the group's rather chagrined singer/guitarist Oliver Obert after the second broken guitar string, midway through a set that began late because the band had locked their keys in their van. But those small misfortunes lent an air of credibility to Married, 3 Kids' "Life's a Plain," in which Obert artlessly wraps a pretty sing-along melody around lines like "I'm sick of always trying to find the right way/I'd rather learn to put up with the wrong one" while Roland Saum kicks up a bit of dirt with abraded guitar chords that bring to mind a ground's-eye view of a ripped-up pair of Converse sneakers stomping through a carefully planted garden.

Saum craftily re-created the lo-fi sound of Married, 3 Kids by running his guitar through a beat-up old cassette deck. His thorny riffs and fraying leads offset the simple strum of Ober's guitar and the sardonic self-depreciation of lyrics like "I'll never make a good boyfriend to my girlfriend," and "It doesn't matter where I go/And if I don't go where I stay/It doesn't matter anyway." Together with a rhythm section that often seemed on the verge of collapse, they reaffirmed that the wrong way of Pavement and GbV is still alright.

-- Matt Ashare