Driver of the Year: Driver of the Year Will Destroy You
By
Evan Sawdey 23 July 2007PopMatters Interviews Editor
Finally: the indie-rock sex album. No, literally. Here is an album that is meant to be blasted out of a Bose mini-stereo while juxtaposed with your lover in lusty abandon. The album’s makers, Driver of the Year, have no problem with this: they even wrote original songs for a porno called Dana DeArmond Does the Internet. Yet a night with Driver of the Year is a night of incredibly average drunken sex. “Teenage Kicks”, the opening track of ...Will Destroy You (their third album) brings your mind to a candle-lit bedroom where saving grace is all the burning incense—and not much else. “Barely Legal” is as felonious as its title, riding tired grooves over a climax that sounds totally fake. However, under all the wash-heavy synths, we hear guitarists Seth Knappen and Jason Parris wanting to bust out like a strip-club version of Sonic Youth, working best on the indie-leaning “Night Receiver”. The excellent “Girlfriend is Better” is the sound of Maroon 5’s “Makes Me Wonder” rearranged for sloppy second-lovin’ (making it—automatically—better than the original). The group has a lot of potential, but the more their minds are out of the gutter, the more exciting the songs sound.
Evan Sawdey began contributing to PopMatters in late 2005 after contributing for years to his college newspaper
The Knox Student. Evan became the Associate Interviews Editor for PopMatters in the summer of 2008, and then the full Interviews Editor a year after that. Since joining, Evan's work has been written for and been quoted/featured in a wide array of publications including SLUG Magazine, The Metro (U.K.), Soundvenue Magazine (Denmark), the Daily Dot, and multiple national newspapers. Evan has been a guest on WNYC's Soundcheck (an NPR affiliate), was the Executive Producer for the
Good With Words: A Tribute to Benjamin Durdle album (available for free at
GoodWithWordsAlbum.com), and wrote the liner notes for the 2011 re-release of
Andre Cymone's hit 1985 album A.C. (Big Break Records) and the 2012 re-releases of
Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder's standalone 1985 pop effort (Virgin/Gold Legion),
the JoBoxers' 1983 debut album Like Gangbusters,
'Til Tuesday's 1985 debut Voices Carry, and
Plastic Bertrand's 1978 album AN 1 (all Hot Shot Records). He is a current member of The Recording Academy and resides in Chicago, Illinois. You can follow him
@SawdEye should you be so inclined.
Driver of the Year - Barely Legal (Live)
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