Indie rock that fondly remembers punk rock! If Archers of Loaf could be called ‘slacker rock,’ then they were some of the hardest-working and keyed-up slackers around.
They weren’t slackers, though — a frankly detestable term that’s clung to some bands from that era. Formed at the start of the 90s in Chapel Hill, a town of less than 40k residents close to the capital of North Carolina, Archers of Loaf put out a very tight body of work—four albums, one EP, one b-side comp—before calling it quits before the end of the decade. Thus, they sometimes get compared to Pavement even though the way I see it, Pavement’s punk songs on Wowee Zowee were steeped in a mocking irony while Archers of Loaf could actually write and perform a punk song. Patrick King’s Bandcamp guide to their discography—some of the most informative writing on the bowmen since Xgau’s blurb on Vee Vee—goes into frontman Eric Bachmann’s no wave influence, and though there is none of that genre’s detached artsiness, there is plenty of the noise.
There are no secret weapons in this band, a very ‘what you see is what you get’ set-up comprised of sturdy rhythm section Matt Gentling (bass) and Mark Price (drums), and in the front-line guitars, the two Erics, Eric Bachmann and Eric Johnson. Frontman Bachmann can belt the words out and entice you to shout these words along with him—“You’ve got it all WRONG!!! and you can’t get it right”—in such a way that it makes me think with a faster, more muscular drummer, they could’ve been the best post-hardcore band since the Dü. But it’s ultimately the guitars backing those words that were doing the heavy-lifting for this band, buzzing and humming and snarling with one another, or sometimes just pinging in their own secret language. Parquet Courts owes their entire career to these guys.
Debut Icky Mettle has their best song in “Web in Front,” which is “Gold Soundz”’s brother — maybe they can dance together. The lyrics are delivered with a surprising tenderness for a band like this such that they seem to be singing about some vague, universal relationship experience (“Lost your friction and you slid for a mile”; “You're not the one who let me down / But thanks for offering”), and I find the sneaking-in of the non-word ‘overlive’ into “Overdone, overdrive, overlive, override” to be really clever. The gold is rougher around the edges since they’re not as melodic as Pavement, but it’s sweetened up by boy band-ish backing vocals. “Web in Front” is so good that it took me a long time to get to the rest of the album, of which only “Wrong” comes close; those opening seconds of crunch and ping combining together into an aural tornado for Bachmann to spring off of is a marvel. I beg people to focus on the guitars and not the lyrics: “She’s an indie rocker, nothing’s gonna stop her” (“Plumb Line”) is truly one of the most horrific things anyone has ever sung in indie, while elsewhere, they admonish an ex-lover that got fat (“Fat”). A quick word that these guys always seemed like they’ve been to one too many frat parties and while it rarely gets as explicit as “Fat” or “Audiowhore,” it recontextualizes seemingly innocuous lines elsewhere as being potentially, well, icky. There’s an Icky Mettle b-side called “Tatyana” that’s especially problematic, “And when she does [make me angry] / I take her by the back of the hair / And I swing her around / And let her go.”
Because all of their albums have at least some filler, there are a lot of people who think that the 5-song Archers of Loaf vs The Greatest of All Time is the best thing Archers have ever released. As a package, I could get behind that, but with the qualifier that their best songs are on their albums. I thrill to Bachmann finally jumping on stage after so much time is wasted in silence and tuning guitars to yell “AUDIOWHORE / SUCKING ON SOUND” but I can’t help but feel like it’s just trying to re-make “Wrong” but not as good, and on a similar note, the backing vocals on “Lowest Part is Free!” is reminiscent of “Web in Front”; “Revenge” wastes too much time on a guitar workout, and honestly, you’re better off with the Peel version on The Speed of Cattle since it cuts that down in half. All of that being said, I wish Bachmann wrote more songs like “Freezing Point,” the unassuming song in the middle of the EP and also the best of the bunch. “Distance is up, static is down / And all the east coast, has burned out / Save for me, save for you / There’s nothing here to fucking do.” It’s a song that reminds me of the feeling of so many Replacements songs, this vast nothingness that comes with being talented and trapped at the same time. These lyrics clearly come from some place real, “I didn’t have the money or the wherewithal to do the bigger cities […] So, the next closest thing for me was Chapel Hill,” Bachmann said on the Bandcamp article. Actually, at their very best, the vocal-guitars combination in Archers of Loaf remind me of Paul Westerberg and Bob Stinson, which is the highest praise there possibly can be.
A lot of people think Vee Vee is their strongest album, and to these people, I pose a challenge: the second half exists. Sure, the sound is crisper, less town basement bar and more city venue, made clear as soon as “Step Into the Light” begins. But the songs dry up in the second half: the 1-minute scratchy thing “1852” (the unnecessary lead-in for “Fabricoh”) marks the fall. “Nostalgia” is an 80-second punk burst that talks about, um, “holding onto filth of the pornographic slut” (an example of what I alluded to earlier about their lyrics), while “Underachievers March and Fight Song” doesn’t even try to entice you to stick around for the bonus track. I like “Let the Loser Melt” the most of the album’s second half, but even that one feels like the Replacements’ “Seen Your Video” in how a rousing instrumental surprisingly takes up a chunk of the song’s real estate, but it also pails in comparison since “Seen Your Video” is basically the greatest indie rock song ever. The guitar pings form their own strange little hook during the choruses of “Harnessed in Slums”; the riff of “Nevermind the Enemy” is the catchiest thing they’ve ever recorded; Bachmann’s performance on “Greatest of All Time” is one of his best, about four pints’ worth of beer on his breath that makes his reading of an audience drowning an imagined “frontman of the worst rock and roll band” feel strange and real.
Whereas Icky Mettle grew off of me and Vee Vee stayed even in my estimation, All the Nations Airports grew on me — I’d say it’s their most varied by alternatively being their most bracing and most touching. By upping the number of songs (from 13 to 15), it lends All the Nations Airports more of a ‘song cycle’ feel even if those extra songs turn out to be more filler: 4 of these 15 tracks are instrumental, and of those four, “Acromegaly” is the clear and only winner, one rhythm guitar gently pulsing and the second pinging prettily over top. Jazz that second guitar line up a little bit and we’d have something like Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint,” or, play it with a keyboard/synth, and you’d have Music for All the Nations Airports. In terms of indie band does instrumental, it doesn’t rank as high as “Return to Hot Chicken” but it’s certainly way, way up there; holding it back is that the band doesn’t know what to do so they just add in the bass and the drums and turn what could have been a touching ambient piece into a rock song. The other three (“Attack of the Killer Bees,” “Bumpo,” “Bombs Away”) are all filler, and while I get the point of ending the album with a pretty piano ballad, “Chumming the Ocean” was right there — the 2000 live album Seconds Before the Accident had the right idea in that regard.
“Chumming the Ocean” is the album highlight, which is strange because it’s so unlike Archers of Loaf. The Bandcamp guide on the band mentions feeling exhausted after touring Vee Vee, and Eric Bachmann is able to channel that fatigue into something deeply touching to the point that while the lyrics describe a diver in danger from some unknown ocean monster, it’s pretty plain that Bachmann relates: “I think he’s in trouble” could very well be about himself, the most straight-forward line in the Archers’ entire discography. The instrumental is bare: just some piano chords bumping into one another, filled out by subtle tape manipulation that makes it feel like you’re at the bottom of the ocean with him — in that regard, it reminds me of what Justin Timberlake and Timbaland were trying to do on “Blue Ocean Floor” (good sonics in search for a good song, that one). If that’s something of a crazy comparison, here’s another one: this song reminds me of Bix Beiderbecke “In a Mist,” a solo piano instrumental that ends up as Beiderbecke’s best song even though piano playing wasn’t his forte. Same case here.
It’s not just these outliers though. “Strangled by the Stereo Wire” cranks up the volume knob exactly halfway through to present both sides of the band—melodic and thrashing—in less than 2 minutes, while the title track has some of their classic guitar noise harmonies. Sure, it’s lazy that “Scenic Pastures” just repeats the verse—always annoying when an artist does this—instead of trying to cook up anything new to say, but the outro is the saddest turn a guitar-heavy indie song has taken since, well, “Dirty Boots” about six years prior. That’s the album’s first three songs, and it’s almost comparable to the opening volleys of their previous two albums if not outright equal.
Xgau reviewed White Trash Heroes positively, stating that “other indie bands should just retire.” What actually happened was that the Archers called it quits instead, having already toyed with the idea following their tour of All the Nations Airports, and with Bachmann getting surgery for carpal tunnel, that was the end for them. “Bang on a Dead Drum” does the Replacements thing of having each member play a different instrument, but whereas the Mats were just having a piss in their early days, Archers of Loaf do this as a songwriting method. What results is their worst song: Eric Johnson literally banging on a single drum (hence the title) while Bachmann shrieks unintelligently over the din. Other loud one “I.N.S.” is one where you can’t wait for them to finish; “Smokers in Love” is worse than any of the instrumentals cooked up in the last batch; “Slick Tricks and Bright Lights” feels like a re-write of “Chumming” with some louder parts to try to hide that fact. The two highlights bookend the album, Who’s Next-style, with “Fashion Bleeds” having plenty of pulse from Mark Price rallying the band with a ‘let’s pull through this’ momentum and a synth line that’s bouncing and oddly fits into the song (oh yeah, there are synths now, just like every other rock album from 1998). Meanwhile, the title track feels like what R.E.M. were reaching for on Up, all dots and loops. Sure, it’s a little long, but it’s as good as a career capper as anyone could have asked for.
That would have been it for the Archers. Bachmann soldiered on with a solo career, both under his birthname and as Crooked Fingers. In 2011, Archers of Loaf reunited for live shows and loving reissues of their back catalogue courtesy of Merge Records, replete with ‘updated’ album covers (I really like the new one of All the Nations Airports and really dislike the new one of White Trash Heroes which takes away from the original’s Beggars Banquet reference). Those reissues have rendered the 1996 b-sides compilation The Speed of Cattle mostly useless; I say mostly, because it has some Peel sessions that you can’t get on said reissues. Of these b-sides, only “Ethel Merman”—bloodcurdling screams there—could threaten to replace an album track, although “Smokin’ Pot in the Hot City” has bumpy, optimistic chords that suggest it could have been a radio hit had the band wrote some lyrics for it and changed the title. The aforementioned “Tatyana” and “Don’t Believe the Good News” are bad. You can also get the demo versions of “Wrong” and “Web in Front” released as singles which made me really appreciate producer Caleb Southern’s work on that album (a Chapel Hill native, who also handled Ben Folds Five around that time): Icky Mettle was originally recorded onstage at the Cat’s Cradle venue during off-hours but sounds like it was recorded in a professional studio thanks to Mr. Southern.
In 2020, they tested the waters of writing new Archers of Loaf material with the singles “Raleigh Days” (touching choruses, verses that have perhaps too many words shoved in there that makes the song feel rushed) and then “Talking Over Talk” (more interesting in its 3-legged lurch but also still not very good; the song feels unfinished). Reason in Decline arrived two years later to mostly critical acclaim—comeback albums are just tricky territory in general, with too much nostalgia tipping the balance one way or the other—but a very hushed reception to Archers of Loaf fans. At least, that’s what it seemed to me: an Archers of Loaf fan that didn’t hear a peep about the album the day after its release. Where once they sounded like New Day Rising, they now sound like Warehouse: Stories and Songs: i.e. no speed or thrust, and altogether not angry enough. Only “Screaming Undercover” proves there’s some fight in them. One of the problems is that Bachmann doesn’t have the same fight in his voice anymore, and so when he sings—at 52 now—about cocaine being crusted around your nostrils on “Human,” it sounds awkward and out of place in a way that his vocals never have before.
Archers of Loaf never courted the mainstream, and though an opportunity to sign onto Warner Music Group’s Maverick Records came after Vee Vee’s success, they opted not to because of their financial obligations to Alias, but I don’t think it makes sense creatively for them any more than it did for the indie bands that inspired them in the first place. And so, in the overcrowded underground that Bachmann lamented on “The Greatest of All Time,” they stuck to their lane and put out a great run from 1993-1996 with one album and one EP per year there.
Icky Mettle - A- Archers of Loaf vs The Greatest of All Time - A- Vee Vee - B+ The Speed of Cattle - B- All the Nations Airports - A- White Trash Heroes - C+ Reason in Decline - B-