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Album Details

• Artist: Archers Of Loaf
• Album: All The Nation's Airports
• Label: Alias
• Year of Release: 1996
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: christopherdrew on 2006-12-28

Can't it be enough to simply say that a band kicks ass? Perhaps, but then you'd be asking me how precisely the band might indeed boot said posterior, and whose posterior it might be in the first place, and now I'm confused.
After the churlish assault that comprised Vee Vee, Archers Of Loaf slowed things down a bit for All The Nation's Airports, focusing on richer compositions as opposed to louder ones, yet not abandoning the noise-ethic they'd already created; songs tend to trail and drift into each other without becoming boring or insubstantial, instead tying the tracks together into a tangential whole. The album allows for a lot more experimentation, with a few instrumentals thrown in ('Attack Of The Killer Bees' drives me nuts, but my guitar-afficianado friends literally drool over it, so what do I know?), while Bachmann's lyrics essentially nail a combination of metropolitan compression and urban frustration.
Despite the overwhelming depression that one derives from Bachmann's imagery, this still remains what is quite possibly Archers Of Loaf's happiest recording, as songs such as 'Strangled By The Stereo Wire', 'Scenic Pastures' and the title track have somewhat of a skip in their usual lurching gait, and even 'Assassination On X-Mas Eve' provides a bit of a singalong; hell, these guys could teach Modest Mouse a thing or two about a bittersweet melody. The album's centrepiece, however, is the haunting 'Chumming The Ocean', a piano-based lullaby that evokes a sense of terror beneath a seemingly serene surface with the simple couplet, "The deep is in riot/the coastline is quiet", and proves that sometimes it's best to turn the guitars down in order to achieve the desired effect; and for a band that's made a name for itself in squalls of feedback, that's actually saying a lot.

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