M U SIC
King Learo The inchoate frustrations of youth and adulthood combust in Archers of Loaf’s revivified music BY CHARLES AARON music@indyweek.com
Slicing the Loaf Here’s why an exemplar of Chapel Hill indie rock is singing about Raleigh in its comeback song BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com
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PHOTO COURTESY OF MERGE RECORDS
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ock ‘n’ roll spews out a few big, beautiful emotions really well, and most of them are related to whether or not you’re having sex. In the indie-alternative cosmos of the 1990s, inchoate frustration was the rock emotion du jour. Launching a long national tour at Cat’s Cradle last Friday, Archers of Loaf showed why they, perhaps more than any local band besides Superchunk—with apologies to Polvo, Dish, Motocaster, Finger, et al.— incited sane people to hype the Triangle as “the next Seattle,” i.e. the nation’s most promising wellspring of rebellious, youth-soundtrack whoop-de-doo. The Loaf was, and is, inchoate frustration incarnate. It’s their métier. But singer-guitarist Eric Bachmann, guitarist Eric Johnson, bassist Matt Gentling, and drummer Mark Price now lurch, churn, thud, and get on their metaphorical knees without the slapdash smear of sound that plagued them 20 or 25 years ago. Bachmann’s gnomic sentence-fragment lyrics range narrowly from annoyed to stymied, but within that tight space, his haunted, dry-roasted bellow somehow tracks an entire life cycle of frustration—personal, collective, or both—from simmer to boil to explosion to exhaustion. I missed the band’s 2011–12 shows in support of Merge Records’ reissues of their four remastered albums, but while facing a teeming crowd of a certain age (plus some curious under-thirties), the foursome made an authoritative roar. Their early, bro-ish goofiness was not missed. It was the first time I’d ever imag-
ined the band commanding more than a club stage. They tore through their ornery catalog with the moxie of dudes who are finally able to inhabit the power of their racket. It was exhilarating from start to finish. Highlights: “Raleigh Days,” from their upcoming Merge album of new songs, was a brisk, wistful blast that sounded wiser but no less gritty than their original tirades. “Wrong” and “Might,” from their 1993 debut album, Icky Mettle, inspired immediate pogoing. The first captures the epic struggle of two people very sarcastically yet very earnestly telling each other to fuck off, while the second is one self-loathing person trying to write a song for another. Bachmann’s lyrical gift is for the overwrought—the nonsense proclamations that frustrated humans tend to blurt. They can emerge out of a shambly, discordant lull like a scrap of pointy dialogue, from stray gripes (“Strike up the band/Turn up the random/Calling out to the A&R,” as “Lowest Part Is Free” would have it) to much-quoted maxims (especially “The underground is overcrowded,” from “Greatest of All Time”). That was once heard as a commentary on underground rock’s transformation into a chum bucket for major-label alt-rock sharks. Now, who knows? Is the underground still overcrowded? What’s the underground? That line might as well be about the sweltering bodies swarming London’s subway. The world has changed, but Archers hasn’t, and these days, you can find frustration wherever you look. Maybe this second comeback is right on time. W
aleigh Days” is Archers of Loaf’s first new song in more than 20 years, but only the lyrics let on that any time has passed. Singer Eric Bachmann still sounds like he might headbutt you. Guitarist Eric Johnson still seems one reckless string bend away from pitching headlong off the stage. Not only is this the careening, scorch-marked Archers of yore, it’s pitched at a nostalgic frequency that only longtime locals will hear. Archers helped make the Chapel Hill indie-rock sound a national craze in the 1990s, in the last salad days of print media both high-toned and Xeroxed. So it seems almost perverse that, after a decade of reunion shows dedicated to their ‘90s Chapel Hill classics, they would return with a song about … Raleigh. Archers isn’t much of a band for lyrical exegesis. Fans have spent decades mumbling through indecipherable words that make even less sense when you look them up (see “Learo, You’re a Hole”), and that rough-hewn surrealism continues here—until you get to the shout-along chorus. “Raleigh days, from the Fallout Shelter stage, heard you scream you’re gonna be somebody someday,” Bachmann blortles. It’s the emotional key to a song about moving forward by looking back. In Raleigh, where Flex Nightclub now stands, there once was a venue called the Fallout Shelter where all the young rock bands played as the punk shows of the ‘80s gave way to the A&R-scout feasts of the ‘90s. In that last flash of record-label excess, music journalist David Menconi remembers the venue as the site of an “insane” bidding war over local band Motorola, later Motocaster. In an interview with me some years ago, Superchunk and Merge’s Mac McCaughan ranked it alongside the Cradle and the Brewery in importance at the time. If Archers of Loaf’s invocation of the little-documented venue is an Easter egg for locals, it’s also a reminder that the legend of Chapel Hill was largely a media concoction, and that Raleigh and Durham played major roles in indie rock’s creation myth. Though Archers’ chorus might be directed at any band they saw striving at the Fallout Shelter, it might also be directed at themselves, 30 years ago, when they stood on that stage, about to be swept up in the post-Nirvana indie feeding frenzy. (Courted by major labels, they were stuck in a bad contract with the indie Alias.) Are they somebody, now that it’s someday? They made all of their music in 10 years and then nursed a fan base that can sell out the Cradle for 20 more. It might not be the career they’d have imagined then, but it’s a legacy, and with new songs emerging at last, the band appears primed for a meaningful second act. (By the way, “blortle” is a word I made up specifically to describe Bachmann’s singing. It’s something between a blurt and a chortle.) W KeepItINDY.com
February 26, 2020
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