There's an argument to be made-- a pretty compelling one, too-- that Archers of Loaf peaked early. Few lyricists in indie rock are as funny or withering or willing to reveal uncomfortable truths straight to your face as Archers frontman Eric Bachmann, and few sounds are as deeply ingrained in the music as the crunch-and-whine of Bachmann and Eric Johnson's dueling guitars. Still, there are plenty who feel that, two records in, they'd made all the music they needed to make. "Web in Front", the glorious gutpunch that opens 1993's Icky Mettle, isn't just their finest song, it's their defining moment, their rocket-shot into the canon.
It was, in a way, all downhill from there: 1995's Vee Vee may be a (slightly) better record than Icky-- wider in scope, yet looser in approach-- and the 17 utterly riveting minutes of bloodletting that make up early EP Vs. the Greatest of All Time place it among indie rock's finest short-players. But that gate-charging momentum's never been easy thing for any young band to sustain, particularly one like the Archers, who arrived on the scene with veins already bulging from the sides of their heads. 1996's All the Nations Airports and 1998's more experimental bow-out White Trash Heroes are, like their predecessors, burly, testy, vital stuff, all mangled chords and full-body tantrums, shot through with an indelible passion. But, where there was once uncontrollable fire, there became instead a kind of intractable weariness, a feeling deeply ingrained into both of the Archers' final LPs. On early classics like "Audiowhore", they almost seemed to be screaming for their lives. On Airports and White Trash Heroes, they were screaming just to be heard, until they'd practically stopped screaming altogether.
When "Harnessed in Slums", the loser-licking highlight from the Archers' second masterstroke Vee Vee, made its way to alt-rock radio, the Archers found themselves with an opening slot on Weezer's post-Blue, pre-Pinkerton tour and the ear of a few major labels. By all accounts, the tour was an unmitigated disaster, but for a minute there, some important eyes were on the Archers; though the obstinately independent band remained signees of the tiny Alias Records, they struck a deal with major-affiliate Elektra for distribution rights to what became All the Nations Airports. The strains of success-- such as it was-- are written right into the record's title track, one of those wonderfully paranoid Bachmann screeds complete with lumpy tourists, soused pilots, and scummy terrorists throwing 'bows.
The funny thing is, the new liners would have you believe Airports is, in fact, a positive jam, a Cinnabon-scented tribute to the peace they'd sometimes find in staring out of airplane windows, having temporarily ceded control to the TSA. Bachmann, then as now, isn't always easy to read; he's never less than lacerating, but he's rarely all that explicit about the would-be recipients of his simmering rage, easier to feel than to comprehend. Still, the asphyxiation-by-patchcord of "Strangled by the Stereo Wire" and the airport-as-Thunderdome one-two that opens Airports is pretty much impossible not to read as an expression of displeasure about the State of the Archers circa 1996. They'd found a little success, but they'd failed to make the leap, and all over Airports, you can feel Bachmann and the band struggling to make some sense of where they'd landed.
Airports is their fullest-sounding record, and perhaps their most purely musical. Bachmann and Eric Johnson's two-guitar assault is prettied up a bit with a couple of piano ballads and the odd synthesizer lick, and quite a few of these tunes splinter off into loping instrumental breaks that, if not exactly capital-G gorgeous, feel less gnarled, more meditative than their equivalents on Icky and Vee Vee. And the chiming near-pop of "Vocal Shrapnel" belongs in the same breath as "Wrong" and "Web" among the catchiest stuff they ever did. But, more often as not, these songs corner themselves, strip themselves down for parts, devolve into noise and chaos; this is the sound of frustration, of an unerringly passionate band going for broke, throwing everything they could into a record.
Some of these excesses have an amplifying effect on Bachmann's vitriol; many of the rest seem to either crowd him out or drag him down. This is why an utter outlier like "Chumming the Ocean"-- the prickly Archers at their loveliest-- is its finest song. The clear, blue piano ballad finds the perpetually put-upon Bachmann throwing a skyward first-- "the hand of god chokes the driftwood with deadweight and brine," Bachmann belts-- but, up against all of the Airports' restless thrashing, it's a moment of zen, an eye in the storm, the one moment where Bachmann stepped back, sat down, and actually got to survey the territory. As ever, he didn't sound too pleased with what he'd found. "Little things can cost you everything," Bachmann sighs, a hint of resignation in his voice.
In 1998, the venerable Robert Christgau suggested that other indie bands, on hearing Airports, ought to consider retirement. Archers did Bob one better: They went and made White Trash Heroes, and after another troublesome tour and a flare-up of drummer Mark Price's carpal tunnel, they bowed out for more than a decade. Certainly their strangest record, the slippery, synth-heavy Heroes was built differently than everything that came before it. The Archers swapped instruments, building songs piece-by-piece rather than wrestling raw material into strange shapes. The results are looser, often quieter, more synthetic and more surreal than anything they'd done before. Bachmann, too, favors the falsetto on White Trash Heroes, his screams giving way to, well, not quite a whisper.
Whatever the Archers sought from White Trash Heroes-- a kind of rejuvenation through dismantling-- they didn't quite get. With its unorthodox instrumentation and downturn in the sheer viscerality behind their first three records, White Trash Heroes moves at a different pace than what came before it, a kind of slump-shouldered perturbation that, 15 years on, still feels a little scattered and somewhat less than ingratiating. The sound is less physical, more cerebral, practically an inversion of their early work. Yet the songs themselves often feel a bit centerless, too simple by half, or simply too strange for their own good. "Slick Tricks" bleeds Brainiac's "Flypaper" dry, but outlier among outliers "I.N.S." comes in just a few clicks below sludge metal, and ostensible centerpiece "One Slight Wrong Move" starts as a clanging nightmarescape and ends as a vocoder-addled choogler.
Some of it works-- the seven minute title track, with its rare flashes of optimism, is among their best-- and some of it doesn't, but there's really no denying that very little of it comes off as well as the kind of dug-in indie-rock these guys had mastered on their very first song. And when a hint of that early clarity like "Perfect Time" cuts through the fray, it sends many of Heroes' less successful experiments into sharp relief. "Banging on a Dead Drum" is a howler, but it's so buried in fuzz, so utterly plonked by that cowbell, it's everywhere and nowhere at once. Same with things like the instrumental "Smokers in Love"; built around a jaunty riff worthy of Battles, it's not quite a focus-tanking distraction, but it's not really a well-timed diversion, either. Large swaths of Heroes find the raw nerve they'd spent the past five years tapping sounding shot, their resolve starting to slip. "Let's fall behind, in perfect time," Bachmann sings, and he seemed determined to do just that. Yet, for all its flaws, Heroes captivates. Over time, the coldness of the music eventually inches a few degrees northward, and when they reconcile the weirdness of the music with Bachmann's fraught observations, as on "Dead Red Eyes", it could be spellbinding.
Both albums' bonus discs are largely comprised of 4-track demos, with a couple of solid-to-great B-sides for good measure. It's illuminating, if not exactly essential; a particularly gnarly take on its title track aside, All the Nations Airports sounds, in demo form, just about how you'd expect. The songs do pack a little more punch without all the adornment, but their gnarly fidelity will make this a one-and-done deal for most. White Trash Heroes' extra disc fares better; led by the punchy, autumnal "Jive Kata"-- among their finest non-LP sides-- you can hear the strange evolution of Heroes' unusual construction in its early stages. Stripped of all its (presumably ironic) flash, the desperation and directionlessness at the heart of the gaudy "One Slight Wrong Move" comes to the fore, turning a slightly depressing piss-take into a plea for escape. On the whole, this music feels unusually restless, spacious, the anxious energy of the past given way to wearinesss, a great band pulling themselves apart in real time.
White Trash Heroes may not be the final Archers of Loaf album all that much longer. After embarking on a series of reunion tours over the last year or so, in recent months, the rejuvenated Archers have given a number of interviews that suggest a new LP may not be out of the question. In those interviews, there's always a note from Bachmann suggesting that, if fans can expect anything at all, it won't be White Trash Heroes (or Icky Mettle, or Vee Vee, or what-have-you) part II. Rather, any new Archers music would most likely show off the influences and aggravations of the decade and change they've spent away, perhaps a bit more in line with the enviable run of Crooked Fingers records with which Bachmann has busied himself with since the Archers' initial split.
The Archers knew then, just as they know now, that a band's got to keep moving, or they'll die, and while it's not hard to hear their verve starting to fade a bit throughout the gnashing Airports and the precarious Heroes, you can't say they didn't go down swinging. Go see the Archers now, and you realize, gruff and inscrutable as they could sometimes be, they've always had good reason to shout. The underground's still overcrowded, a nice collection of things is still the best some of us can do, and scraggly, smartass, concession-averse bands like the Archers are still fighting to be heard.
