Never mind Never Meant. On their fourth album, emo elders American Football exorcise midlife demons with their most dark, adventurous and possibly best play yet.
‘Fuck it! Let’s play roshambo,’ Mike Kinsella throws out during Patron Saint Of Pale. Backed by playground clapping and Steve Lamos’ stumbling beat, it’s a playful suggestion that undercuts the fact the game of rock-paper-scissors is being played to settle divorce negotiations. ‘If you win I’ll never ask to play again, / I’ll come home.’
It’s the kind of disarmingly childlike moment in which emo elders American Football have specialised since their landmark 1999 debut, caught between vulnerable innocence and the bruises of experience. The four members are no longer precocious Midwestern students, but men entering middle age with years of baggage. And as the crimson cover of their fourth self-titled LP hints, a lot of blood has been spilled in its making.
Creative friction between founding members Steve and Mike during early attempts at LP4 caused Steve to officially leave the band for two years. Mike’s recent divorce and subsequent struggles with alcohol bleed heavily into the lyrics. Most notably on epic lead single Bad Moons. Unfolding like stages of grief, multi-instrumentalist Nate Kinsella’s cascading string loops and Steve Holmes’ cyclical guitar figure build tension as Mike spirals downwards with each confession, ‘I poured my drinks in the dark, I explored new kinks in the dark.’
It’s heavy, undoubtedly, and several tracks flirt with death. But exorcising their demons together has strengthened American Football’s unique chemistry and created their most adventurous music. Tempestuous opener Man Overboard swells and crashes with the ebbing between Steve L’s tumbling jazz groove and churning, distorted guitars. As on the album’s cover there is light that pierces the gloom, too. No Feeling’s breezy dream pop is imbued with a heavy glow through shimmering background vocals provided by Turnstile’s Brendan Yates
Like the circus performer narrator in closer No Soul To Save, American Football’s fourth album walks the tightrope between despair and the soaring, joyful wonder in their music. ‘I’m not afraid,’ Mike declares, making it to the other side over the kind of giddy, polyrhythmic guitars that first wrote the band into emo history. This one may just be their best.
Verdict: 4/5
For fans of: Sunny Day Real Estate, Touché Amoré, Manchester Orchestra
LP4 is out now via Polyvinyl.
