Go Loaf

A meandering treatise on Archers of Loaf and my personal music history

This Sunday, July 24, I will - presumably groggy from a weekend of heavy physical activity and beer consumption in the face of the dawning work-week - make my way to East Atlanta. I will face my two of greatest dislikes – parking in areas with limited parking and staying up late on a Sunday night – for a concert I am not convinced will be “good”.

It will be the third show of the weekend for the venerable indie-rocker Archers of Loaf. The band members are approaching their forties, and their notably energetic live shows were said to have quieted down even before their original breakup a dozen years ago. Frontman Eric Bachmann’s post-Archers of Loaf project Crooked Fingers produced the most reliably sad indie albums of the past decade. Guitarist Eric Johnson attended law school following the Archer’s dissolution. They’ve grown up.

I’m hoping the reunion has rejuvenated the group and they’ll be every bit as energetic on day three at The Earl as they were on Friday nights at Cat’s Cradle in 1993. I’m possibly optimistic, but deep down, it doesn’t matter. I enjoy their music enough that I’ll have fun regardless and, more importantly; I’m seeing Archers of Loaf for more abstract than aesthetic reasons. For me, Archers of Loaf was a gateway band, and this concert represents something akin to a pilgrimage, albeit less hyperbolic.

I wasn’t a huge music fan growing up. I definitely lacked the pseudo-hipster chops I’ve developed. My elementary school CD case contained All-4-One, The Eagles, Presidents of the United States of America’s second album, some “Weird” Al Yankovic, some R.E.M., Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Ace of Base’s debut album. Not particularly embarrassing, save multicultural boy-band All-4-One, but very limited (and only one early R.E.M. record, though I did have Automatic for the People). Regardless, I pretty much stopped with new music during middle school. I knew that I hated 90% of MTV’s Total Request Live, and most things on pop radio. I was tired of hearing the same 70 songs on my mom’s oldies station over on over on my way to school. I guessed I just wasn’t in to music.

This started to change when a little illegal toy called Napster crashed through my 56k modem and into my junior high heart in 1999. I was as astounded by the technological implications as I was flummoxed by my inability to even think of that many songs I wanted. I began my music discovery with an AOL Instant Messenger window and a recurring request: “Tell me a song to download.”

Through this method, I exploited my network of well-to-do white peers until I had a bourgeoning 200 song library of classic rock staples. I went through my Zeppelin phase, my Pink Floyd phase and my retroactive Weezer phase before Lars Ulrich’s children felt their first pangs of hunger. My computer had become a commercial-free 96.1 The River.

Like most artistic-minded youths in small-town settings, I spent a long time patently unaware of non-homogenized culture. The theme song from Kids in the Hall was as close to underground music as I got. In my bubble, unaware of payola-influenced radio practices and the lowest-common-denominator appeal of mass culture, I assumed that what made it to the radio was the cream of the crop. Enough enjoyable “Flagpole Sitta’s” and “Impression That I Get’s” emerged from the murk to maintain this charade; I grew to believe modern music was dead and buried, and Linkin Park was holding the shovel.

Enter my Holy Trinity. My older cousin was much more in to music than me, a fact I discovered on a weekend trip to Atlanta. I heard the name and a single track¹ by an outfit called Modest Mouse. Intrigued, I went home and found² the single “Never Ending Math Equation,” a masterful low-fi juxtaposition of light-hearted philosophy and self-effacing angst which almost instantly rewrote my internal narrative on the state of music. The question begged: if this was out there, was there more? My cousin supplied me with two more names - Built to Spill and Archers of Loaf. I was delivered from radio.

Though all three are indie icons, they are united in my mind only. Built to Spill and Modest Mouse share roots with Oregonian indie label Sub Pop, but sonically each group conveys the strengths of very different frontmen. Built to Spill is built on Doug Martsch’s plasmatic guitar stylings and sheepish voice. Modest Mouse echoes Isaac Brock’s reclusive drunkenness through his grating double-tracked vocals, ethereal layering and moment-of-clarity harmonies. Archers of Loaf’s sound relies on Eric Bachmann’s pseudo-slurry full-throated delivery backdropped by a precariously balanced drum-and-wandering-guitar bombast.

On the strength of these three artists, I learned the way of indie rock. But they are not equals. Both Built to Spill and Modest Mouse made it to the underground spotlight in the mid-to-late nineties, while Archers of Loaf had called it quits by 1998. The former two kept rocking, with Modest Mouse even achieving mainstream radio play thanks to 2004’s “Float On.” As a result, I’ve seen Brock and Martsch’s outfits live and kept up with new releases; though they peaked before I was aware of them, I still grew with Modest Mouse and Built to Spill. Archers of Loaf, meanwhile, called it quits while I was still streaming midis.

Archers of Loaf also had the most scattershot output. While Modest Mouse and Built to Spill lost a bit of their edge in recent years, they still had discernible career arcs. Archers of Loaf, meanwhile, foreshadowed the Pitchfork hype-machine era, growing word-of-mouth acclaim for their wild live shows and exploding on the scene with a never-to-be-replicated live album. Archers of Loaf arguably peaked with the first song of their first album, slacker love song “Web in Front.” Though they never had a true dud of an album, the rest of their catalog saw a few choice cuts sprinkled here and there as the cacophony descended into synthetic weirdness. The last track from their final album, the eponymous "White Trash Heroes," is a nearly eight minute specter built over a haunting repetitive synth-chord progression. As the coda drones out, this is not even the same band that wanted to nonsensically be your spine³ .

Timeline placement forced me to experience my Archers of Loaf fandom with some level of disconnect. Crooked Fingers just wasn’t the same, and unlike the multitude of kids who idolized Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, there would be no shitty cover bands to replicate the experience of being there. You could argue, quite validly, that seeing a band live and looking forward to the potential of new releases ultimately means nothing. I’m sure a bunch of second-generation Beatlemaniacs would thusly challenge this framework (whereupon an army of Phishheads would condescendingly engage them). I’d be cheering for the Lennon/McCarthy disciples, but in my head I know I fall on the Phish side. Concerts are more than just being close to a band while their music plays⁴. Concerts are an opportunity to experience the full energy of a band, the essence of their being. Good concerts fill a large group of fans with this same energy, creating a shared experience so powerful that shuffling out of a crowded two-door club drenched in sweat, with ears ringing and knees aching, seems like a small price to pay for the memory created.

This is why hipsters create internal checklists of bands they’ve seen and namedrop the ones they caught early on; being the first to discover such an experience is a point of pride. Because clichés like “losing yourself” and “feeling it” exist for a reason. For those who love live music, every show opens with the potential for transcendence. Whether the show is truly special or not, just seeing band live gives fans a fuller understanding of what the band is about. Live shows enhance or unveil the endearing pretentiousness of The Flaming Lips, the ageless rambunctiousness of The Pogues, the ethereal hipness of TV on the Radio. We find out how intimately involved Win Butler is with Arcade Fire’s emotional music, that Carlos D is the only animate human in Interpol and whether or not the lead singer of Black Moth Super Rainbow is a caterpillar.

I’m not sure what I’ll find out this Sunday. Maybe nothing. Regardless, I’ll have completed an homage of sorts. The three personal gateway icons of my internal music history will have been experienced in the flesh. In almost any conceivable way, this means absolutely nothing. This entire essay was an attempt to ascribe meaning in some way, but somewhere I lost track and just tried to convince someone to take my extra ticket. I suppose it comes down to the same pseudo-obsessive collector mentality that causes people to hoard baseball cards, vinyl, Pokémon, and Afghan rugs. I’m collecting a specific experience from my master list of musical artists. Archers of Loaf will complete one of my most important subsets, and that’ll be worth a twenty-spot and a painful Monday morning.

¹Nope, I don’t remember which one.
²I was using virus vessel KaZaa at this point.
³And it wasn’t. Looking back, everything about Crooked Fingers makes much more sense with this song in mind. Yet none of it is quite as good.
⁴Well, besides Interpol concerts.