Archers Of Loaf - We!Want!Waste!

Technically less brilliant, but certainly more versatile than Dinosaur Jr, inclined toward dissonance and obliqueness only distantly related to the intellectual noise of Sonic Youth or the crooked lo-fi philosophy of Pavement, as loud and raucous as the Pixies at their best, yet even less inclined to play by the rules of the market, the Archers of Loaf embodied, more than any other 90s alternative band, the true independent attitude, turning down deals with major labels and playing up the "disturbing" traits of their own music without ever turning it into a manifesto; simply carrying on writing excellent pop songs wrapped in newsprint: dirty, raw, honest and powerful.

Archers of Loaf formed in 1991 in a small North Carolina town. Chapel Hill has a population of fifty thousand and a couple of promising underground bands already active: Superchunk and their college punk-rock, produced by a certain Steve Albini, and the newly formed Polvo, who, with insistent guitars and a taste for obliqueness, were getting ready to demolish the song format with their debut album "Cor-Crane Secret".

It's no coincidence that the four University of North Carolina students, Eric Bachmann (vocals and guitar), Eric Johnson (guitar), Matt Gentling (bass) and Mark Price (drums), aim for guitar-driven impetuousness on the first single "Wrong", a teenage romantic tirade as simple in content as it is in form: a four-chord riff, a few breaks in pure old-school punk style, and plenty of rage channelled into the kind of fundamental energy a debut needs. "Wrong" was destined to remain the band's calling card, the perfect cross between melody and noise, and the fact that the single landed the four of them a deal with indie label Alias (Yo la Tengo's home) marked the momentary triumph of guitar power over sonic cleanliness — something Bachmann and co. have never cared much about anyway.

Icky Mettle opens with the radio-ready refrain of "Web In Front", built on a rhythm that's anything but metronomic; a rhythm section worthy of the scrappiest Pavement and a constant electric fuzz are joined by reverberated, distant guitar lines with an emo pedigree that, with just a few melancholy notes, colour and enrich an essentially bare-bones arrangement.

While Bachmann takes care of the compositions' skeleton, with a distorted backing over which a hardcore-thick vocal looms large, Johnson tries to soften the two-dimensional abrasiveness of the songwriting by widening the guitar spectrum with catchy, melodic touches that give a more playful lilt to the nursery-rhyme feel of "Plumbline", or conversely with dissonant high-frequency interjections as in "Learo, You're a Hole".

The guitars' starring role is especially clear from the sheer number of instrumental passages on the record: the whispered verses over a simple bassline in "You And Me" set up the stereophonic explosion of guitars and feedback that swallows the frontman's screaming voice, while "Toast" is a nervy, almost entirely instrumental gallop that gives creative dignity to a debut built entirely on energy and excess — the quartet's true trademark. There are several moments where the band simply stays on well-worn tracks without adding anything new (the punk-hardcore blast of "Sick File"), but there's certainly no shortage of the strong personality of a band bent on dismantling the very idea of "genre", revisiting, for instance, folk conventions in the ungainly 3/4 of "Hate Paste".

Having renewed their deal with Alias, they decided to expand their repertoire on their own terms. They did so with the EP Vs the Greatest of All Time (whose title track, for some reason, actually appears on the following album), the American band's true masterpiece. One after another, linked together as if in a rock opera, come the hard-rock-tinged "Audiowhore", the bouncy, energetic "Lowest Part is Free!" — a perfect summa of the Archers' style, drone-string tunings and chaotic double vocals included — the college melancholy of "Freezing Point" (complete with a shouted "Guitar!" and the resulting distortion-soaked instrumental bridge), the oddball "Revenge", which sounds like it's been lifted from the soundtrack of an Eastern western, and finally the accusatory, darker "All Hail The Black Market", which closes with the cynical words "Superficial motherfucker wasting".

Vee Vee (Alias, 1995) is a further step forward, not so much in content as in form. The band had gained confidence, the production is sturdier, and everything feels tighter, without losing its noise-rock soul. Once again, the four from Chapel Hill went against the grain, bookending the record with two decidedly misleading moments: "Step Into The Light" is a slow, lysergic lullaby that no producer would ever put first on a record; closing things out is "Underachievers Marchand Fight Song", a whistling, cacophonous fanfare that sounds more like a provocation than anything else.

In between: the "I!Want!Waste" of "Harnessed In Slums", a "definitive" hit for college radio, hormonal ups and downs like "Underdogs Of Nipomo", the agonising noise of "Fabricoh" and "The Worst Has Yet To Come", the spoken-word hardcore of "Nostalgia", the stunned loneliness and despair, and the rage of "Floating Friends" and "Death In Park".

Recorded in a single week, Vee Vee is one great, libertarian scream, a gesture of defiance against the world and against music itself, the unstoppable expression of an act of creation:

They caught and drowned the front man

Of the world’s worst rock and roll band

He was out of luck

Because nobody gave a fuck

The jury gathered all around the aqueduct

Drinking and laughing and lighting up

Reminiscing just how bad he sucked

Singin’ throw him in the river

Throw him in the river

Throw him in the river

Throw the bastard in the river.

da “Greatest Of All Time”

A feared (and despised?) maturity

How did Bachmann and co. picture themselves as grown-ups? Having turned down a record deal with Madonna's label, you somehow have to prove you deserve your independence, to explain to yourself what you still have to say to justify doing things your own way with such conviction in your own abilities; at the same time, the move from Alias to Elektra (under the Warner umbrella) means you have to prove you can treat music as a professional job.

All The Nation's Airports was therefore tackled by Archers Of Loaf in this state of mind: they spent three weeks recording it, giving up on capturing their teenage angst live and direct; on top of that, they now knew exactly what they needed to get the sound they had in mind.

The band's evolution, however, is a natural one: All The Nations' Airport is a record with a clean, expansive sound, as if telling an epic of American loneliness — the muffled lights of an airport seen from inside your own car through the rain (a premonition of "The Lonesome Crowded West" and, for those so inclined, of more "material" events to come).

Shuffling through all the nation’s airports

(da “All The Nation’s Airports”)

Introduced by its "natural b-side" "Strangled By The Stereo Wire," a comic-book nursery rhyme of disturbing non-sense and anti-chaos fury, the album showcases a much broader sonic and expressive range, a desire to describe perceptions and thoughts in a way more articulate than the simple but forceful guitar din of its predecessors, especially Icky Mettle. In short, the long-awaited and long-feared maturity has arrived.

While returning to the stylistic tropes of 90s alternative rock, the register often shifts even within a single song – as in "Scenic Pastures," with a bare, elusive guitar line reminiscent of Feelies, a middle section in which Bachmann seems to drag the song toward a noisy catharsis, and then suddenly a closing of bewildered melancholy, with the opening guitar returning and locking into simple chords that seem to dissolve into the bewilderment of loneliness, of emotional abandonment.

The triptych "Worst Defense"–"Attack Of The Killer Bees"–"Rental Sting," on the other hand, seems to trace an anxiety-ridden build-up, in which the choice – dating back to Vee Vee – to use long instrumental passages to express a mute, inexpressible yet total pain stretches across multiple tracks, culminating scenically in the dead calm of "Rental Sting," a lament of alienation: “Dead and white, our distance is disguised/ Mad and sad when it’s my misunderstanding/ Rental sting, the customer is king/ Waste your life, waste your life”.

More simply, All The Nation's Airports contains the band's first non-guitar-driven tracks, using on "Bombs Away" and "Chumming The Ocean" a dusty piano ("saloon-style," as Bachmann calls it), with the latter a heartrending pop composition with strong narrative and, more broadly, representational elements.

But Airports is also an album of great instrumental openings, as in the build of "Acromegaly," an expression of what is perhaps the "best" kind of wordless rock: a song that carries an emotion within it, or rather describes its very gestation through overlapping arrangement lines that bloom with a kind of undisguised wonder at the appearance of life, or at least of something connected to it.

In All The Nation's Airports, then, all the intellectual nuances emerge – already hinted at on Vee Vee – that underpinned the youthful rage of the early albums; a hybridization predictably frowned upon by the band's die-hard fans, to the point that everything following Vee Vee is generally dismissed as the band's minor material.

Not that it isn't, exactly, but more due to a less focused inspiration (the band being in a transitional state) than to any unfortunate choices regarding sound or expressiveness in general. The Archers Of Loaf were simply turning into another band (perhaps into Crooked Fingers, Bachmann's outlet in the 2000s), a band trying to connect visceral expression with thought, turning its inner convulsions into a broader reflection. Which is not only acceptable but fascinating too: perhaps, though, it's not quite how the Archers pictured themselves growing up. Bachmann himself has stated: "Our music isn't meant to be smart; it's supposed to be visceral."

All of this comes through even more clearly on the following White Trash Heroes, which almost seems like a sneer aimed at themselves: Bachmann abandons his bark in favor of a faint half-falsetto, which makes "Dead Red Eyes" sound like a Fleetwood Mac track; his Waits-esque Barry Black project echoes through the blues of "Slick Tricks And Bright Lights"; mechanical clanks, vocoder and industrial-style declamations take hold of Bachmann on "One Slight Wrong Move"; a cold, detached prog epic wraps around the instrumental swirls of "Smokers In Love"; improvised experiments like "Banging On A Dead Drum," in which the band members swap instruments, come across only as signs of fatigue and boredom.

Proudly entrenched in some kind of random experimentalism, White Trash Heroes sounds, in every note, like a farewell record, one in which the band has no desire to communicate at all – the album's only apparent purpose seems to be justifying, through random devices, the simultaneous presence of four people in the studio. Sales are poor, as is the tour: the Archers even struggle to reproduce the songs from their latest album live. Drummer Mark Price's carpal tunnel surgery seems like the excuse the band had been waiting for to certify the end of their creative drive.

Proof that the band's breakup didn't happen under unpleasant circumstances: on January 15, 2011, Archers Of Loaf reappeared on the stage of the Cat's Cradle, the venue that had hosted their final show, in Chapel Hill (it's now located in nearby Carrboro). Their reunion closely followed those of other great 90s bands, including Pavement, Dinosaur Jr. and Guided By Voices, and came with a full reissue of their catalog through Merge. No new releases are planned, but, as we know, Archers Of Loaf will simply do what they've always done: whatever they want.

Enrico Viarengo: Icky Mettle, Vs The Greatest Of All Time, Vee Vee

Lorenzo Righetto: Vee Vee, All The Nation’s Airports, White Trash Heroes

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