By:
William Michael Smith
Unless they’re trust-fund babies, major label darlings or living with significant others who have good jobs, most musicians support themselves by working in the service industry as waiters, busboys and dishwashers or as anonymous retail clerks or odd-jobbers. The second album from pissed-off middle-aged Austin pop-rockers the Service Industry isn’t as full frontal an attack on W’s world as the Molotov cocktail album Ranch is the New French was, but don’t think that means the pens are any less sharp on Limited Coverage. With Meat Puppet Curt Kirkwood joining on guitar, the band’s mainstream power-pop sound is a perfect camouflage for these angry, Nick Lowe-ish blue-collar songs about the trials and tribulations of working-class people. There’s no mistaking the 21st-century anomie in tunes like “They Fired Me,” “Job of Quality” or “Have to Go to Work.” In fact, the band seems to have plugged directly in to a national feeling of anger toward and mistrust of the social overlords perhaps unseen since the days of Woody Guthrie and the Great Depression.
