If you caught me at the right time during the early part of the last decade, you may remember me as The Guy Who Would Argue That Archers of Loaf Were Better Than Pavement. I developed this position at a time when it was useful to a have a Thing and for that Thing to kindle debate. Garden-variety contrarianism? A little, but I was a liberal arts major on a Midwestern state university campus, and for the first time in my life the most cred-heavy rocker in the immediate vicinity. There was hot indie truth to be spoken to power. In head Loafer Eric Bachmann, I'd found my wingman: Here was a guy who gave zero fucks, one who came from an era in which the appropriate response to a buzzstrong debut was to retreat to your undersized Cali label and record an album about just how full of shit everyone is, yourself included.
That album was 1995's Vee Vee. It arrived after Icky Mettle, the debut that saw AoL emerge as underground heroes during a period that also saw their home base-- Chapel Hill, North Carolina-- championed as a launching pad, like a Brooklyn that someone had papered over with dogwoods. The band probably bristles at the Pavement comparison above, but the liner notes to this reissue contrast the bands, and the Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain reissue jokes of an upcoming book titled Better Than Archers of Loaf: Pavement for Dummies (imagine me upon its release, red-faced amidst my college newspaper colleagues).
The Loaf started out as affable goofballs with a penchant for scene politics. When they returned with Vee Vee, they were changed. Suddenly brawny and ill-tempered, they sounded upset. I was too young to catch Vee Vee's bluster, but like holiday tunes and odes to cities, songs about "the scene" are evergreen. So I was scribbling lines like, "The underground is overcrowded," and, "It's too bad that your music doesn't matter," in spiral notebooks years after they'd arrived, years before I might have embarrassed a future self with them on Facebook. Vee Vee is a particular kind of screed, one that is as smart and accurate as it is angry and self-destructive. It's also funny as hell: Run Bachmann up against whichever lampooner you think has indie culture by the balls and see who comes out ahead. (I'll submit this line, from "Death in the Park": "It's always the same people/ Pissing the same people off.") Vee Vee might just have easily been reissued with a Blogspot/Tumblr doublepack instead of the traditional collector-detritus disc two.
Fortunately, Bachmann's well-honed bark serves as a base to all his acid. It never sounded better than on bloody-chin classics like "Harnessed in Slums"-- a college radio smash-- and "Fabricoh". The best of the second disc-- "Telepathic Traffic", "Bacteria"-- don't add to the band's legacy so much as remind how pleasant it is to be yelled at by Bachmann. He has a way of laughing at his peers, his audience, and himself without seeming dickish. On "Fabricoh" and "Underdogs of Nipomo" he plays vocal Tetris, stacking phrases into solid walls, missing often enough to leave holes.
The band, too, was never stronger or more pungent. The guitars do that distinctly mid-1990s indie thing in which notes bend or dissipate before phrases finish. On the slow-swinging chorus of "Floating Friends" they vine upward and offer a prettiness rare to this band. The everyman rhythm section is drunk, but only a little. When the group distills Bachmann's derision into a mild torpor on "Greatest of All Time", the Loaf sound like the only band on the planet smart enough not to apply for the title.
The remastering here is nice even if Vee Vee always sounded great. The second disc drags on several early demos but is a valuable archive (splitting hairs: The band's best-ever non-album material, Vs. The Greatest of All Time EP, belongs here spiritually, sonically, and chronologically but was sacrificed to the Icky Mettle reissue). AoL reached their greatest heights on Vee Vee, but it's also the album where they overplayed their hand. Indie rock deserves to be clowned as hard and as often as anything, but when you reach the point where you're screaming "Nostalgia!" at your audience, or towing around the flatulent "Underachievers March and Fight Song", you might just need a vacation.
Bachmann wasn't a prophet or a culture vulture. I think he was a smart guy who made smart observations about things that irked him, but his cynicism corroded Vee Vee. On songs like "The Worst Has Yet to Come", I can hear Bachmann convincing himself that his position is untenable. The first line of that song is, "We're on the outside/ And we're all making fun of you." This level of bitterness can seem the Truth, but it takes so much energy; Vee Vee is as wearying as it is incisive. By the time I was actually listening to this music, Bachmann had gravitated toward the quotidian concerns of the American songbook with Crooked Fingers. Vee Vee's humor, commentary, and song-by-song knockout punches make that energy seem worthwhile. As when the biggest guy in the bar has your back, Vee Vee is filled with extra spittle and bottomless bravado. When I want to laugh at, scream at, or revel in indie rock's existence, Vee Vee is what I reach for, and Bachmann is still the guy I want on my side.
