Sometimes I just want to change the world all around," sings Robert Ray on the debut album by the Florida-based band the Vulgar Boatmen. It's a line filled with the kind of uplift and intensity we've come to expect from conventionally ambitious rock & roll bands. "But last night," he adds, "I just sat there" – thus separating himself in a definitive way from the idealistic posturing of so many of his colleagues.

That is the kind of numbing but thoroughly believable realization – fraught with the frustration of love and wishes at their most hopeless – that characterizes the songs of the Vulgar Boatmen. You and Your Sister, produced by the Silos' main man Walter Salas-Humara (who founded the Boatmen in Gainesville in 1982), is an acoustically oriented album, similar in its simplicity of tone and instrumentation (acoustic and electric guitars, accordion, bass and drums, with a touch of viola on "Change the World All Around," "Margaret Says" and "Drink More Coffee") to records by the BoDeans and Marshall Crenshaw.

The Boatmen often sound like the Feelies minus the feedback, but songwriters Robert Ray – an English professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville – and Dale Lawrence have a more classic bent. For one thing, unlike the more surreal Feelies, Ray and Lawrence have been known to finish the sentences in their songs. (This is an achievement of sorts; the two men live in separate states and write on cassette via the mail.) The band's spare, thoughtful melodies inspire daydreaming and reveries about unresolved romances.

Sister is a highly atmospheric record, full of taut rhythms and hard, hypnotic guitar strumming. The twelve songs are all imaginatively set in some hot-summer-afternoon landscape and are infected with restlessness, not a bad motif given that thwarted desire can often make for the best rock & roll. "Mary Jane," the opening cut, uses a stuttering rhythm guitar and an utterly uptight vocal to convey a mood of unrequited lust that persists to the album's end. It's impossible to hear lines like "We're gonna drive somewhere" sung blankly and repeated over and over, on "Drive Somewhere," without wanting to get up and walk around the room very fast. Similarly, a phrase like "I'm supposed to be thinking about the rest of my life," from "Margaret Says," has an air of edgy puzzlement, curiously heightened by the laid-back tempos and folkie melodies surrounding it. On occasion the band can kick out the jams, but for the most part the Boatmen's music has a rarefied, dreamy quality well suited to its subject matter.

At their best, the Vulgar Boatmen capture the fearful lurch of the stomach that precedes calling the object of a crush for the first time. Half dizzy adrenaline high, half sheer sick terror, You and Your Sister gives expression to those everyday feelings of indecisiveness and discontent that so easily shake the soul. (RS 571)

GINA ARNOLD