ALBUM (Vinyl, Digital)
American Football (25th Anniversary Edition)
American Football cut its first—and, for a long time, only—LP in four days, as the spring of 1999 slid into summer. Steve Holmes, Steve Lamos, and Mike Kinsella were college kids who knew that as soon as their album of spacious and tenderly sad songs was done they likely would be, too. Aside from a few shows, they would break up at the end of the school year and perhaps go on to other bands, jobs, and lives. And for a long while, of course, that is exactly what happened: American Football’s sole album was a twinkling and circuitous entry in the annals of Midwest emo, remarkable for its musical tenderness and lyrical ellipses but largely unremarked upon, too.
But what happened over the next two decades is an inspiring saga of wonderful work slowly finding its audience. American Football went from cult classic to emo linchpin, its reputation and sales accreting like sand piling up in some endless hourglass. The little white house on its cover, a physical manifestation of the Anywhere, U.S.A. melancholy of its songs, became a musical landmark. Reunions, reissues, and two new albums followed, American Football finally climbing atop its own steady growth curve and staring out to the massive and enchanted crowd it had created, to the scene it had helped foster. Made at the end of the last century, American Football, or LP1, unequivocally stands as one of this century’s most influential rock records.
When Polyvinyl released American Football in 1999, it was still an upstart label, an outgrowth of a fanzine with a simple business model and a pure passion for releasing the music co-founders Matt and Darcie Lunsford loved. They didn’t gripe much, then, when their new trio splintered into other acts. Both label and band have grown in the quarter-century since in ways neither would have predicted. After a years-long hunt for the original Digital Audio Tapes and a subsequent quest for a machine that would render them properly, American Football has been lovingly remastered by original mastering engineer Jonathan Pines in Urbana’s Private Studios, where it was recorded. The intertwined guitars have more sparkle, the drums more bounce and flash, the occasional bass more depth. This is the definite version.
ALBUM (Vinyl, CD, Tape, Digital)
American Football (Covers)
Alongside and in celebration of American Football (25th Anniversary Edition) arrives American Football (Covers), an ingeniously programmed set that highlights not only the way American Football fueled an eventual “emo revival,” but also and perhaps more important how their songs and sounds infiltrated and inspired so many corners of music. From string-swept and imaginative folk to idiosyncratic international pop, from intricate instrumental splendor to open-road shoegaze wonder, (Covers) traces—or at least teases—the endless ways the source material has cut across borders of generation, genre, and geography. It affirms just how important the nine songs three college kids cut in four days remain.
Kinsella’s lyrics on American Football were specific in detail but vague in situation. What we knew was that a relationship was collapsing with less animosity than regret, a sense of future nostalgia shaping words that asked how an ex-couple might feel as the summer passed and they maybe saw each other again. This framework, then, is a perfect invitation for different singers to climb inside and find their own interpretation. There is, for instance, a sweet sense of hope to Iron & Wine’s opening rendition of “Never Meant,” Sam Beam’s singular falsetto pealing like an apology, hoping to pull his lover back toward a relationship’s center. Ethel Cain, meanwhile, lingers and wallows in the uncertainty of the paradoxically titled “For Sure.” Above long, soft drones and guitars that twinkle like stars being extinguished forever, she settles into this song about never really knowing what’s happening. Doom is a foregone conclusion. It is beautiful and tragic, every scene of being together rendered as a pure hypothetical.
In one of the most faithful interpretations here, M.A.G.S. borrows the bitterness and conviction of “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional,” less a break-up song than a reckoning with the breaks reality sometimes requires. His keyboard-traced and drum-driven version is sweet but sharp, a reminder that a stop can be an act of self-care. Blondshell slinks into a similar realization during “The Summer Ends,” taking shelter beneath a haze of multi-tracked harmonies and circular guitars to wonder what it’s going to take to move toward happiness—for herself and her partner, either together or apart. “Both been so unhappy,” she sings faintly after a fever breaks. “So let’s just see what happens/when summer ends.” Appropriate for a band who could never have predicted what the future held for these songs, American Football is about not knowing what’s up ahead. Each band here sings that eternal plight in their own tone and tongue.
When American Football wrote and recorded these nine songs in 1999, they were also punk kids who were becoming interested in jazz and modern classical. The touchstones that always appear are Miles Davis, Steve Reich, and The Sea and Cake, but the bigger lesson is their interest in engaging other textures and approaches than distortion and drive. That’s clear in the sparkling guitars and shifting rhythms, in the traces of trumpet and whiffs of keys. And it is obvious on (Covers) in the assorted shapes these songs take.
Though never forsaking the tune itself, Manchester Orchestra imbue “Stay Home” with Reich’s pulsing repetition and Electric Miles’ opalescent glow. They find a way to reconnect the song to its burgeoning references. Yvette Young, of Covet, uses webs of guitar, layers of granular synthesis, and lines of mercurial strings to turn the once-skeletal “You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon” into a lush world. And there at the end, John McEntire, busy back in 1999 scheming Tortoise’s Standards and The Sea and Cake’s Oui, routes “The One With the Wurlitzer” into a Motorik anthem. It feels as emotionally unsure as all of American Football, the beat pushing forever forward while the bittersweet keys seem to turn backward, staring off at what might have been.
On the sidewalk outside of the famous house on the cover of American Football, several lines mark where Chris Strong likely stood when he snapped the photo. They are invitations to capture the scene, just as Strong did in 1999. But on the cover of (Covers), nine different images show the home during subsequent phases of the night, the glow from the upstairs window eventually overrunning the frame. That’s more fun than a mere replication, the same lesson that this compilation holds: Eschewing mimics for acts that took a little bit of American Football and made their own way, (Covers) is a testament to the imagination not only of the original but to those who continue to find it twenty-five years after the band assumed they were done.
