Archers of Loaf
Reason in Decline
(MERGE)
After 24 years away, Chapel Hill’s Archers of Loaf return with their fifth album, the follow up to 1998’s White Trash Heroes.
If you arrive at Reason in Decline expecting a continuation of the loose-limbed, wild-eyed, and reckless Loaf of old, you will be surprised at what you find. Their appeal back then lay partly in their delectably haphazard nature, Eric Bachmann’s screamed melodies and vicious lyrics striving to surface through crashing waves of Eric Johnson’s guitar.
Here, though, slacker cynicism has turned to focused stoicism; fast and loose now measured and taut. There’s no pretence of recapturing the shabby, shimmering thrills of the past—this is absolutely, definitively not a nostalgia record—instead offering a modern, masterful document of the personal and political, turning its dark, hard themes fearlessly into phenomenal rock songs.
“A flash in the dark/A knock on the table/ Beautiful dreamer/Pitiful failure,” sings Bachmann on the beguiling, spectacular “Saturation and Light,” while on the throbbing “Screaming Undercover” he notes, “Everybody’s dreaming but the dream is a lie.” As earnest and honest now as they were cynical and cryptic then, these songs aren’t calls to arms, but unerring observations of how we try to remain human in the face of the horrors of the modern world. As Bachmann brilliantly puts it on the enthralling “Mama Was a War Profiteer”—“We kissed as everything burned to the ground.”
There’s hope here among the wreckage, as on the epic “In the Surface Noise,” where we find “Teenage infidels/Forming rebel cells,” but conversely, on the plaintive “Aimee,” the acceptance that “I don’t mind if we can’t find our way home.”
It’s a tough, heartfelt record that marries hard-edged, emotionally complex lyrics to skyscraping sounds and delivers a thrilling, vital whole. These feel like the perfect anthems for our times, the past be damned. (www.archersofloaf.net)
By Michael James Hall
Arctic Monkeys
The Car
(DOMINO)
For anyone yearning for an Arctic Monkeys record that revisits the “505” or fake tales of San Francisco, you’d probably best look away now. While the era that first put them on the map will always hold a special place in people’s hearts, one thing Arctic Monkeys can never be accused of is living in the past.
Every subsequent release since the band’s debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, came out back in 2006 has strived to open doors into pastures new, often confounding expectations but never disappointing. And while 2018’s sixth LP, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, strayed away from the heavy guitar led compositions we’d been accustomed to, it also seemed the logical next step for a band that’s long since departed their South Yorkshire roots.
So, with The Car as their preferred vehicle of choice, Alex Turner and co’s next journey is one of heartbreak and reflection, with a soothing undertone and the occasional foray into disco-era David Bowie for good measure. Written and recorded last summer at the height of the European Championships where England narrowly lost on penalties to Italy in the final, The Car is a deftly constructed, lavishly produced, smooth runner of an album that undoubtedly reaffirms Turner as one of the great romantic lyricists of his generation.
Lead single “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball” might just
