Authentic alterna

Archers of Loaf redeem the underground

by Matt Ashare

They caught and drowned the front man of the world's worst rock-and-roll band/He was out of luck because nobody gave a fuck/The jury gathered all around the aqueduct, drinking and laughing and lighting up, reminiscing just how bad he sucked, singing, `Throw him in the river, throw him in the river, throw him in the river, throw that bastard in the river.'

-- "Greatest of All Time"

Twisting and bending the unstated rules of pop, venturing into the unchartable sonic terrain that lies between melodious chords and cacophonous clusters, discovering rich new veins of melody in what often seems like the strip-mined realm of modern rock -- that's one way to describe what North Carolina's Archers of Loaf have spent the past four years doing. Or you can look to the lyrics of head Archer Eric Bachmann and read into them a new mythology of the American indie-rock underground, an absurdist fantasy about a world in which being the worst rock-and-roll band is a capital crime, and an awkward, rambunctious foursome from Chapel Hill have enough Icky Mettle (as one Archers album title has it) to go up against the Greatest of All Time, whoever or whatever that may be.

That underground is, as Bachmann sang on "Greatest of All Time," from Vee Vee (Alias, 1994), "overcrowded." The concept of "alternative" has been rapidly and irreversibly devalued by mass-produced, "dry-brewed" beer, Sex Pistols soda commercials, and so much of the unremarkable music that gets called alterna-rock. So it makes sense that Archers of Loaf, who come to the Middle East this Sunday, have made the jump to major-labeldom with the new All the Nations Airports (Alias/Elektra), rising up from the overcrowded underground like some ragtag band of partisans, guitars askew and slightly out of tune, to fight the forces of bland, boring music.

At least that's what it sounds like to me when the band kick into the buzz-and-hum of the disc's first track, "Strangled by the Stereo Wire." If you're not careful these days, Bachmann seems to be warning, the cord on the back of your Nakamichi may just reach over and strangle the life out of you. It's a suggestion that Bachmann and partner-in-Loaf Eric Johnson back up with optimistic volleys of beautifully barbed guitars.

"I don't want to sound negative," emphasizes the 26-year-old Bachmann from his home in Chapel Hill, "because I'm really not jaded. But I can't watch TV or listen to the radio anymore. And I don't want to trash people in bands like Everclear, because they're just nice guys making music and trying to get paid for it, but that's just the most banal music to me. I mean, Dishwalla? They suck. I know it's just rock music and I know it's just fun and it's not important, but it shouldn't be monotonous."

Bachmann has made that point before. "Get so bored with your radio/So bored with your video!" was one of the more straightforward lyrics he screamed over the clamor of rattling guitars on Icky Mettle (Alias), the band's 1993 debut. But that sentiment has more often been implied, than stated outright in the controlled chaos of songs that bounce restlessly from noisy, hyperactive postpunk to wistful and sardonic ballads, fighting boredom every step of the way. The result sounds something like a cross between Sonic Youth and the Monkees, with all the paradox that the image of Thurston Moore banging away at "Stepping Stone" suggests.

There are familiar strains running through the band's short, productive history -- three full-lengths, an EP, and a full disc of outtakes, all on the California-based indie Alias, in three years. Icky Mettle owed an obvious debt to the early Replacements, whose singer once screamed, "Seen your video/We don't want to know." And the infectious din of Vee Vee had its roots in some of the same hallowed indie-rock turf as Pavement and Superchunk (the Fall, Television, and Mission of Burma being some of the more salient postpunk influences for all three). Bachmann is the first to acknowledge the Replacements as a formative inspiration -- "I'm not going to try and deny that," he says, "but there's nothing wrong with trying to sound like a good band, like the Replacements."

He's a little touchier about certain other comparisons: "When you get told in reviews and by people after shows, `You guys sound like Superchunk,' it can be frustrating. I mean, you pour your heart into something and somebody says, `You sound like somebody else.' We're not influenced by Superchunk or Pavement or Polvo, but we are influenced by some of the same bands that influenced them. I like all those bands, but we're not lifting stuff from them. It all comes from Television, Mission of Burma, the Fall, Velvet Underground, and a lot of other bands."

Bachmann's right to the extent that Archers' songs have always had a way of veering off the beaten track just as soon as the first hook is planted, taking melodic and rhythmic turns that follow a mysterious inner logic. Listening to a tune like "Strangled by the Stereo Wire," or any of the other 14 tracks on All the Nations Airports, is a bit like looking at the proverbial pointillist painting -- the closer you get, the less sense it all seems to make. Bachmann and Johnson's guitars push and pull, if not in opposite then at least different directions, dotting the background with stray chords, staccato runs, and bleeps of noise and feedback. The rhythm section (bassist Matt Gentling and drummer Mark Price) doesn't seem to be holding things together so much as just jerking them forward. And it's hard to imagine Bachmann's strained, hound-dog bark of a voice -- one of the band's defining features -- wrapping itself around anything resembling a warm, fluid melody. Yet through some haphazard miracle of physics and chemistry, or strange aural illusion, it all coalesces around a common theme, merging into a kind of volatile harmony.

"It's just an innate personality thing," is how Bachmann explains the process. "We're all kind of disoriented most of the time, so there's a certain element of it not making any musical sense in any traditional way. The songs generally start with me, but when I come in with my part, I'll just say, `Here's what I'm doing and you guys do whatever the hell you want.' I won't even tell them the notes or the chords I'm playing. So you have four heads trying to create one focus, and I think that makes it distinctive in a way. It's a process that leads unknowingly to what we do, and after you listen to it for a while, it starts to make sense."

All the Nations Airports, by virtue of some major-label money, is the Archers' most focused effort, at least in terms of production -- the signal-to-noise ratio is higher but there's still plenty of fuzz in the background. ("We had six or seven days to record the first two records," says Bachmann, "and they gave us four weeks in the studio for this one.") "Strangled by the Stereo Wire," which clocks in at a hyperactive 1:46 before segueing abruptly into the disc's longer, raucous title track, starts things off in familiar Archers terrain, teetering precariously close to the edge of melodic mayhem without making the leap. Elsewhere, though, there are more relaxed, poignant moments, where Bachmann accompanies himself on piano ("Chumming the Oceans") and brings to mind Paul Westerberg's "Androgynous" interlude on the Replacements' disc Let It Be. That tune, along with the twangy instrumental "Bumpo," are little reminders to those in the know that, working under the alias "Barry Black," Bachmann released a stylistically diverse and adventurous disc of (mostly) instrumental material two years ago (Barry Black on Alias).

Bachmann's lyrics, on the other hand, are just as hard and as much fun to decode as they ever were, which is part of what makes the Archers of Loaf such an intriguing band. He's sort of the Mark Leyner of the rock song, going off on sardonic, absurdist tangents that make their own convoluted sense as they develop. "They capped our hero under mistletoe" he sings on "Assassination on Christmas Eve," a song that seems straightforward enough at first -- it's about the pathos and irony of a murder happening on Christmas Eve, right? Not quite.

"I was just sitting there at home trying to entertain myself," he recalls, "and I started playing the backward loop on the four-track. I thought it sounded like Santa Claus getting shot. And that's where the lyric came from."

"Assassination on Christmas Eve" isn't the only track on All the Nations Airports inspired by abstract associations. A long night at Heathrow Airport provided some of the details for the disc's title track, but Bachmann says it was part of Gentling's bass line ("It sounded like an airplane crashing") that jump-started the idea. "For me, it's really more about the sound of everything together. The words come later, after I've mumbled a melody of the music. That's when they change from nonsense syllables to actual dictionary words. It leaves the lyrics vague, which I like because each time you listen to the song you can get something else out of it. There are only a few people I can think of who can write really specific songs about a girl or an experience and do it well -- Lou Barlow and Elvis Costello come to mind. But I think I've come to the point where I have no desire to write a song that means anything."

Archers of Loaf play the Middle East downstairs this Sunday, October 20, with Skeleton Key and Jack Drag.