American Football

You can’t miss

What you forget

Urbana-Champaign is a college town in the heart of Illinois, a few hours south of Chicago. It's where Mike Kinsella moved to attend college - Kinsella, who as a teenager had played drums in his brother Tim's band, the seminal Cap’n Jazz. That band, so sui generis within the emocore scene of the time, set in motion the paths of several musicians and bands from the Chicago/Milwaukee area, first and foremost Joan of Arc and Promise Ring, as well as what - until just a few years ago, before the band's unexpected 2014 reunion - would have been considered nothing more than a brilliant one-off: American Football. Kinsella finally picked up the guitar and, between classes and exams, started playing with Steve Holmes and Steve Lamos, forming the band in 1997. Kinsella had known Holmes since high school, while with Lamos he'd shared the very brief experience of The One Up Downstairs, which in 1997 put out a single three-track EP for Polyvinyl that can be considered the project closest to the American Football sound.

Far from everything and everyone, in the frozen heart of the Midwest, after a self-titled three-track EP (Polyvinyl, 1998), the trio made one of the masterpieces of American indie, as well as a landmark work of the second wave of 90s emo: the self-titled "American Football" (Polyvinyl, 1999). The album was recorded by Brendan Gamble in just 5 days at Private Studios in Urbana, simply to capture the band's experience before splitting up, following graduation and their departure from the small college town. Burn to shine.

The songs essentially grew out of the guitar riffs that Kinsella and Holmes wrote together in their dorm room, later developed and embellished by Lamos's drumming and trumpet. They basically originated from jams, in which various instruments lent to the band by other college friends were put to use. The album thus reflects that thirst: to experiment, to compose, to explore new timbres and to make productive use of the spleen of a small town and a college town, like Olympia or Austin, between Illinois's sweltering summers and freezing winters. American Football's influences are wildly varied: Slint, Red House Painters, Codeine, Tortoise, Can, Steve Reich, Slowdive, Nick Drake, Weather Report and Beach Boys.

Emo at heart, math-rock/post-rock in intent and jazz in spirit, the nine tracks that make up the album share a quality that almost feels trite to point out: they're extremely intricate yet remarkably direct at the same time - an incredible weave of interlocking guitar phrases, muted notes, repeated notes and drum fills that never feel predictable ("You Know I Should Be Leaving"), layered with bass, electric piano and melancholy trumpet melodies, as if played by a horn player who'd wandered off from his marching band, or a voice singing about a breakup ("For Sure"). The two guitars converse, intertwine and multiply with a skeletal minimal/kraut imprint and an Americana/fingerpicking feel, while the drums weave intricate jazzy patterns, full of syncopation and off-beats. Emblematic of this multifaceted nature are tracks like "Never Meant", the album's electrifying incipit, "Honestly?", with its percussive instrumental coda, and the gorgeous "Stay Home", with its two-part structure.

The guitar interplay often unfolds like voices, countermelodies and emotional reverberations of the lead vocal. Kinsella's aching voice floats above the instrumentals, never overwrought, steering clear of the screams and fervor typical of emocore in favor of whispering intimate, emotional lyrics that read like pages torn from a personal diary — steeped in that same everyday intimacy that would later be explored and elevated in the Chicago singer-songwriter's solo project, Owen, through which, after the brief American Football experience, he would fully mature as a musician (and as a man, husband and father). The outro of "The One With The Wurlitzer", vocal-less and driven by the drums, fades in and fades out like a snapshot caught in the middle of a jam session, distilling the spirit of the entire album to its purest essence.

The album was championed and produced by Polyvinyl Records, the DIY label from Urbana-Champaign that, in the best tradition of independent labels, started out as a fanzine documenting the local music scene before becoming a label proper once it decided to start releasing companion records for its readers (just think of Slash in Los Angeles or Touch & Go in Chicago). The album cover captures all the intimate, mysterious energy of the record: a photograph by Chris Strong, taken among the houses of the University of Illinois campus, showing a lone lit window on the second floor of a white house glimpsed from the street — an implicit tribute to the metaphysical tradition of American painter Edward Hopper.

The album arrives at the tail end of this molecular movement — spanning both coasts, from New York State to Washington, by way of Kansas and Texas — and stands among the genre's masterpieces alongside searing works like Sunny Day Real Estate's "Diary" (Sub Pop, 1994), Mineral's "The Power Of Failing" (Crank!, 1995), Texas Is The Reason's "Do You Know Who You Are?" (Revelation, 1996) and Get Up Kids' "Four Minute Mile" (Doghouse, 1997). The band's sound, immortalized by this recording, is and will remain absolutely unique and virtually impossible to replicate, built on that special formula of technique, melody and experimentation: no other emo band will ever sound like American Football.

"American Football" was for years at the center of a cult following that few could access, counting among its devotees even Italian musicians like Jukka Reverberi of the Giardini di Miro. You could buy it in special places like Wide Records in Pisa, or in stores dealing in independent labels and used records in the United States. Fortunately, to mark the album's 15th anniversary, a deluxe edition was released, also featuring recordings of some rare period live shows. Echoing the trajectory of other bands who went unnoticed at first — Slowdive (already mentioned) being one prime example — American Football have finally achieved the recognition they always deserved, and have taken their rightful place in music history, particularly that of American independent music, right where every fan of the band always knew they belonged.

These four years

and how we say goodbye to these four years

A long goodbye with mixed emotions

Just fragments of another life

Ride the wave of great music

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22/09/2019