Archers of Loaf
Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro
Rock ‘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 imagined 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.
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