**1/2 Archers of Loaf

VITUS TINNITUS

(Alias vinyl EP)

In an overcrowded underground, the Archers have always stood above countless other earnest and frayed guitar bands, yet they've kept their career as firmly harnessed to their slum as any professional gangsta rapper. It's not an easy feat. Over the course of five really good to pretty great CDs, they've forestalled "maturity" and avoided amateur atrophy by continuously honing their tangled sound and desperate sensibility till they've become as distinctive and inscrutable as Pavement or Sonic Youth -- and almost as virtuosic.

This EP gets over another way. Pressed exclusively on 10-inch vinyl and released without the distribution help of Alias's new big brother, Elektra, it just offers minor variations on old album tracks: the six noisy live cuts are taken from a show last October at our own Middle East; the two mildly remixed closers are from All the Nations Airports. Yet every selection comments on bohemia with a simple raw pithiness, and from the bedlam of "Harnessed in Slums" to the beauty of "Scenic Pastures," the sequence coheres more forthrightly than any of their other product. Of course, it's just chum tossed to obsessive fans and collectors, but that's sort of the point.

-- Franklin Soults