It appears that Mormon season has begun. Outside Falconetti’s East Side Grill on Commercial Drive, pizza-faced missionaries barely out of high school slouch by in the cold rain, followed a few minutes later by more of their brethren. Inside, Swank vocalist Spencer McKinnon and guitarist Doug Liddle have joined the Straight to talk about their own inimitable take on American-fried religious dementia, as laid out on the band’s newest album, Campfire Psalms.

“Drunkards’ Damnation Jamboree” kicks off the third full-length from the Vancouver roots veterans with a rousing group sing-along that leaves little doubt as to where Swank falls on the issue of being liquored up and bound for a place where it’s always hot. Three tracks later and the five-piece is delivering a hell-bound shuffle called “Shoot at the Devil”, replete with maniacal preachifying and sidelong references to the NRA. “Fiery Pit” plows another furrow of Jack Chick–inspired lunacy, again shot through with Liddle’s banjo (a new toy for the guitarist), and “Comin’ to Our Town” is a sweaty wingding fashioned to sound like it was recorded in a revival tent, with a hammy McKinnon vocal that’s a ringer for redneck icon Jerry “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” Reed. What are the chances this cheerfully offensive stuff would play in the collapsing-church territory of Abbotsford, say? “As long as it was really loud and you couldn’t make out the lyrics,” reasons Liddle, with a persuasively sincere expression.

Given Swank’s sometime affection for burlesque cowpunk, the combination of hillbilly music and fire-and-brimstone religiosity was certain to prove irresistible eventually.

“They’re hymns for agnostics,” Liddle says of the band’s latest batch of songs. “It’s a great bank of imagery, and it’s a great palette for telling stories, and the music is really rich as well. You don’t have to believe what people are singing to love the music.”

Liddle also cites the band’s “gospel fixation” for taking Swank in the direction of “Can’t You See”, an earnest soul belter written with Otis Redding in mind. “I’ve been pushing soul for a while,” states McKinnon, who gets the chance to work his impressive pipes on the track. “I was pretty hard-line on it. It’s good to branch out from the country thing.”

As it turns out, the “country thing” only makes up about half of the story on Campfire Psalms. There’s the wistful barfly lament “Tragic Suit”, for instance, and an airy contemplation of love endearingly titled “Punched in the Eye”. And the bigger picture also includes Swank’s value-added packaging, which is no small thing in this case: Campfire Psalms comes with a bonus 10-song karaoke DVD, lovingly assembled by McKinnon and drummer Kirk Douglas.

“Well, we add a few things,” McKinnon says. “Because we have to. You can just download everything, so you have to put extra into it if you want somebody to purchase an item and carry it home. It was a lot of work, but that’s okay.”

It was actually about 20 hours of work per song, McKinnon casually reveals, and that’s not including his comprehensive scouring of the on-line Moving Image Archive for funky old public-domain footage, hygiene films, ancient stag movies, and trailers for forgotten grindhouse flicks.

“It was just hours and hours and hours of us sitting around,” the singer sighs. “It was a labour of love, definitely.”

“I can’t think of any local band that loses as much money as Swank,” adds Liddle with a proud smile.

When the band released its 2004 album, The Survival Issue, McKinnon’s determination to raise the bang-to-buck ratio resulted in the extraordinary video for “How Do We Do”. Bravo viewers were treated to the cheerily macabre, award-winning animated short more than a few times. How the hell did they pull that off?

“Well, I have a friend who was working on Spider-Man, the animated series,” McKinnon explains, with a shrug, “and he knew all these guys who were unemployed animators. And there was a facility that was dormant, with all these guys sitting around waiting for a phone call, so I had an idea, and [Swank bassist] Phil [Addington] had some money, and so”¦”

And so it came to pass that Swank had an entire animation studio at its disposal, although Liddle claims that incriminating pictures of the animators might have played some part. “That video would have cost us $80,000 if it wasn’t for that,” he deadpans.

In reality, Swank’s cachet as a reliable presence on the local circuit—sort of like Vancouver’s own Waco Brothers—has earned the 10-year-old outfit a heap of goodwill, as well as a certain reputation as a band’s band. Listening to Liddle hold forth on the topic of local music suggests another reason for the affection that tends to come its way, above and beyond Swank’s surplus of talent and imagination.

“It’s extraordinary,” he says. “I can’t go and hear everybody that I want to hear. There are more bands that I like than there is audience to listen to them, which is unfortunate. But I think you can just boycott anybody coming from anywhere else and just see local bands, and still have a very, very rich cultural experience just listening to local music.”

Amen to that.

Swank holds a CD-release and Swank-aoke party at the Railway Club on Friday (June 6).