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Album Details

• Artist: Archers Of Loaf
• Album: White Trash Heroes
• Label: Alias
• Year of Release: 1998
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: christopherdrew on 2007-01-12

It's interesting to compare the two songs that bookend White Trash Heroes, Archers Of Loaf's final album; 'Fashion Bleeds' opens like a noise-rock call-to-arms, with dueling guitars and stuttering percussion, the whole band committed and ferocious, while the title track ends the album on what seems a solo affair, as Eric Bachmann describes scenes from an American wasteland over keyboard loops and a minimal drumtrack. It's almost a perfect transition from indie-rock pioneers to Bachmann's later project, Crooked Fingers (which, if you haven't checked out yet, you should do so immediately), as though the other band members (guitar hero Eric Johnson, bassist Matt Gentling and drummer Mark Price) took their leave somewhere between the two songs.
Not that the album suffers from any lack of contribution from these three; while White Trash Heroes is disjointed and disfigured, perhaps the roughest of any Archers offering, it's also a sound of the band at their most experimental, as their favoured hook-laden songs are swapped for more assaulting compositions: the blistering 'Banging On A Dead Drum' is hard to listen to for very long, and 'I.N.S.' recalls The Jesus Lizard at their most snarling. Not everything is loud-bang-crash, though, as tracks such as 'Dead Red Eyes' & 'Slick Tricks & Bright Eyes' present a more subtle side of the band. Bachmann's lyrics of urban paranoia reflect an even darker shift in tone, as the wry sense of humour that would usually offset his grim meditation is missing, leaving instead only a bleak, unforgiving landscape.
In fact, on a whole, the album itself resembles a monstrous mechanical beast lurching towards its doom, all bursting pipes and grinding gears, looking for a place to die; as though the band, faced with the future of rock in watered-down grunge contemporaries and the spawning of nu-metal simpletons, decided to run their creation into the ground, going out in a gorgeous mess of sound (perhaps inspiring the title of their live release, Seconds Before The Accident). Fans of their earlier, somewhat-more accessible material might have a hard time with this one, but it's a fitting last hurrah for a band that wasn't afraid to make our ears bleed while they played us a pop song.

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