ALT-ROCK BAND UNDER THE RUG does everything in-house. They work out of a commercial building in Los Angeles, unmarked except for a small home-made sign that reads: “Rugs.” Inside, they operate a full-scale recording studio.

Singer/Guitarist Casey Dayan explains: “Tracking a full rock band these days is tough and expensive, since everyone’s taping egg-crates to their apartment walls. We all had backgrounds in audio and session playing, so we figured we’d handle production ourselves. I think it allows us to make choices a lot of music projects these days can’t.”

Under The Rug is Casey Dayan, lead vocals/guitar; Sean Campbell, vocals/guitar; Jesse Holsapple, bass/vocals; and Brendan McQueeney, drums and percussion.

“Pretty much everything we released this year has been a weird/totally unique narrative,”  Brendan McQueeney adds, “Take Sarah’s Daydream, for instance. It’s a pretty succinct story of a woman looking to get out of an abusive relationship. Or Three-Legged Dog, which [almost voyeuristically] follows a guy trying to find a place to spread his mom’s ashes. These are real stories. Casey works really hard on writing these songs.”

Casey adds: “But it’s not, like, a folk project, or an Juno-indie lyrics-or-bust kind of band, either. I take a skeleton to the guys, and then everyone figures in their own expertise. It’s really impressive what this group of nerds can do with the right starting place.”

In this way, their songwriting gives equal attention to lyricism, musicianship, and arrangement. Many of their songs don’t follow the archetypal  ABAB rock format, rather they flow with the lyric’s story arc as the song progresses.