For most bands with names and album titles like these, you just assume they're sardonic jabs at the straight life, the songs themselves getting on with a variety of topics or at least wide variations of the theme.
The Service Industry's
Limited Coverage, however, is an actual concept album of sorts about the routine tedium, aggravations, hassles, and injustices suffered by the many millions of people stuck in dull dead-end jobs. So most of the songs are about the little indignities of the workplace, whether idiot bosses, getting fired for unjust cause, doing inventory, and so forth. The musical execution is a little more upbeat than the subject matter, generally favoring a power poppish style, most often with a dash of punk, though bits of reggae and country-folk-rock figure into the deal too. If you're going to dwell so extensively on mediocrity, however, you've got to do so in a way that's much more interesting than the actual things you're writing about.
Limited Coverage doesn't accomplish this, despite the presence of
Meat Puppets guitarist
Curt Kirkwood on a few tracks. For all its good intentions, it's about as standard-issue in indie rock terms as the products generated by many people in actual service industries are. ~ Richie Unterberger