Turns out you can prosper making scruffy albums in your basement, even if you don't blow up like Green Day. Take Scrawl and Sebadoh, grizzled veteran bands who have made homey albums for nine and seven years respectively, and recently released two of their best yet. Whether you call the rudimentary rumble of these groups garage rock or lo-fi or indie mainstream, it's all loud music made with no regard for big-time radio or the fringes of experimental noise -- pop songs more as obsessive hobby than career. And with indie rock, no matter how many true believers claim otherwise, persistence poops out more often than it pays off.

Nowadays hundreds of bands get to release small-label records, switch styles, switch personnel, switch management, break up after a decade and enter the job market with poor prospects. And while it's always a close call, most are not worth the trouble to get to know them. Marcy Mays and Sue Harshe of Scrawl and Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein of Sebadoh are different: You got drunk with them Saturday night in the high school parking lot even if you didn't realize it.

Lead singer and guitarist Mays and bassist and singer Harshe worked as a trio with drummer Carolyn O'Leary when they came out of Columbus, Ohio with the brief album "Plus, Also, Too" in 1987. Scrawl's perfect name was as elevated as the group's lyrics and playing ever got, and the plainspoken quality was the point. Mays would yearn to go shopping nonstop in "Great American Pastime" even as she gulped "I can't make fun of the cross." In "Slut," she fretted she was becoming one -- and without gratification, even. She simply concluded, "I'm a sincere white woman." Half the songs were hookless duds, but only a lump wouldn't want to hear the album occasionally.

And so it went for many years. Scrawl switched to drummer Dana Marshall in 1992, but the unevenness never left. Mays and Harshe could prickle the skin with a number like "Take a Swing," which vividly nails down the moment when a couple's screaming match teeters on the edge of a slugfest. They were just as likely to pick a dandy cover tune like Cheap Trick's "High Roller" and fumble all the melody out of it.

Now Scrawl have signed to a major label (Elektra) and gotten a well-known if not exactly celebrated producer (Steve Albini) for their new "Travel on, Rider," and it doesn't make a whit of difference. Then again, remaining unfazed has become a virtue of Mays and Harshe. Scrawl have inserted a drone or two on each release (their debut included one called "Loser"), and the track that gets all the attention here is "He Cleaned Up." Mays chants the grim cycle "He cleaned up/She took him back/He fucked up/She kicked him out" 23 times, faster and faster. It's prime punk minimalism. The more elusive meditations on the moods of female characters, however, make "Travel on, Rider" a vital Scrawl entry. Women gripped by doubt or unmet desire commandeer the band's material, with boys relegated to (insistent) background noise.

Because solos and other diversions are virtually unknown in Scrawl, the killer cuts have to be models of concision. About a half-dozen qualify with "Travel on, Rider." My favorite devices are the relentless riff and chorus interlock of "Good Under Pressure," Marshall's sinewy drive behind "The Garden Path" (about a role model who finked out), and the bouncy bass figures of "Easy on Her Mind," in which "scenes of all the lovely ones she hopes to have in bed/Go easy on her mind." And Mays means the fantasies are both enjoyable and should be excused.

A poignant focus of Scrawl's songs is the many women who have no regrets, but are damned lonely nonetheless; the chunky refrains work a sort of blues exorcism on their melancholy. Scrawl speaks in a low-key idiom, but if you hear it, it opens a cult that's not just a fashionable corsage.

The reaction to bad Sebadoh songs is worse than the shrug that Scrawl clunkers get. One has to laugh out loud at the throwaways on the first five or so releases: tin-eared mash notes, cracked memories of surf or Merseybeat tunes, pinhead pyschedelia, and absolutely scads of uninspired punk-noise workouts that clatter on long after everyone gets the message, the purpose, the plan, the gist, the thrust. Basically, there were too many songwriters in Sebadoh, who began as an offshoot of the overly revered collegiate punks Dinosaur Jr. After Eric Gaffney left in 1993, Lou Barlow and Jason Loewenstein worked up a nice guy/nasty guy routine designed to make all the girls in town confess their affections.

In the spirit of home improvement, Barlow and Loewenstein have gotten better with their tools, and "Harmacy" (named after a drug store sign with one letter missing) throbs with a chiseled sound their old selves would have sneered at. Hey, now the guitars get to have rounded characteristics, too. Barlow, especially, has paid attention to craft until he can hit pear-shaped notes every time he wants to on a number like "On Fire." The title and the tone of the song echo back to the neoclassic teen yearning of the late-'70s indie group Shoes, who in turn wanted to update the early Beatles at their most quiveringly concupiscent. After much floundering around in years past, Barlow has discovered just the right spritz of cynicism to add to the mix: "Now it's feels like I'm on fire/It's burning the world through/But don't hold it against me/I know you're lying too."

The wiry, acrid licks of Loewenstein's "Prince-S" announces his attitude before he makes it explicit: "Not a hug but a choke." Still, he admits later in the number that "There's not much that needs fixin'/I can't quit when I'm addicted." And by the time Sebadoh wraps up the album with the gonzo chest-beating of the Bags' "I Smell a Rat" ("I woke up, took a shower/Now I've got SOUL POWER/I smell a rat, baby"), they are firmly in the line of rock's rascal romeos, playing with the head to tickle the heart and vice versa.

While "Harmacy" lacks the shiver of discovery that animated 1994's "Bakesale," the band's first cleaned-up collection of love songs, it's still cunning and slippery enough to make a fine soundtrack for Nick Hornby's novel "High Fidelity." Sebadoh's commitment operates on a widespread frequency, too. Barlow's "Willing to Wait" could be an answer song to Scrawl's "Come Back Then." These are love-song writers used to missteps from partners, and the groups share a huddled-together quality, comforting fans in a world where love is all that can't be downsized.