C'mon Already- Start a Fire

It has taken the Saps four years to come up with a follow-up to their first full-length album, Finally, a Band You Can Trust, which seems like a long time for ten songs with a running time of 34 minutes. But this is a group that makes its nut playing bars in the Midwest, not recording self-released CDs, if only because their familiar two-guitars-bass-drums instrumentation and pop/rock sound, supporting singer/songwriter/guitarist Dan Lastick's catchy tunes with quirky lyrics, hasn't earned them the attention from the record industry that it should have. Lastick's music harks back to the mid-'60s, the heyday of this sort of style, but he's probably spent more time listening to the Replacements and the Cars from the '80s than the Count Five and the Five Americans from 20 years before that. In any case, he has his own skewed viewpoint, full of funny, odd observations, self-deprecation, and unexpected twists, all expressed in an adenoidal tenor over the chiming guitars and driving rhythms. The Saps' music is good enough to make a listener wish that the recording itself were better; there seems to have been a deliberate attempt here to bash out the performances in a willingness to sacrifice precision for spontaneity. But music this tuneful works better if it is played well, and Lastick's wit is sacrificed if his words are unintelligible. Of course, this is the sort of band that doesn't have much time or money to be making records, and even in their primitive quality, these recordings reveal a group of considerable promise, led by a talented songwriter. The potential is clear, even if the execution leaves something to be desired.