Archers Of Loaf Talking New Kind Of Trash
Reflecting for a moment on his band's newest music, Archers of Loaf bassist
Matt Gentling feigned concern that the nearly completed album lacked one
crucial element: the Mom and Dad scorn factor.
"My parents really like it," Gentling said backstage before a recent show at the
Trocadero, a small club in Philadelphia.
"That might be a bad sign," 27-year-old singer/guitarist Eric Bachmann
reminded him.
Despite this parental approval, Gentling and the band seem content with the 10-
song album, which is being mixed in a Charlotte, N.C., studio. White Trash
Heroes, as it is tentatively titled after one of the cuts, will be Archers of Loaf's
fourth full-length album. It's due out in late August or early September.
But Bachmann said the power-pop rockers have changed their sound
somewhat on this one, pulling back from the aggro-rock sound that has
dominated much of their work and giving the songs a little more room to breath,
Bachmann said. And this all was accomplished with Brian Paulsen, who
produced the Archers' 1996 album, All the Nation's Airports, once again
standing behind the sound board.
"Everybody keeps telling me [the new record] is more adventurous," Bachmann
said. "There's more space in the songs than in the past." In fact, two of the tunes
pass the seven-minute mark.
"Airports came together as a whole," Bachmann added later. "This one is
a little bit more just a collection of songs than a start-to-finish work."
The Archers' altered sonic approach was made clear during the band's show
that night at Trocadero, part of a recent five-date mini-tour that took the band
around the East Coast. New songs such as "Dead Red Eyes" and "Perfect Time"
were gentler, more expansive and less noisy than older favorites such as
"Harnessed in Slums" and "Web in Front," which the Archers also played live.
At the performance, the Archers did without the low-tech Yamaha PSS-50
synthesizer that Gentling said was used extensively on the new record. "It has
99 sounds, and four of them are great, and the rest suck ... Mine has the Billy
Joel demo key on it," he said. "The thing is, you buy an $8,000 keyboard and
only one or two of the sounds are good."
To make more room on the recording for the new sounds, Bachmann said, the
Archers relied less on his and Eric Johnson's guitars. As a result, Bachmann
said, "The vocals aren't as buried. I don't have to shout as much." Rather than
talk up the new album, Johnson, 28, spent his free time before the Trocadero
gig catching another band's show elsewhere in Philadelphia.
The new songs were written over a one-year period when the band as a unit
was relatively inactive, practicing sporadically and not touring or recording at
all, according to 26-year-old drummer Mark Price.
The bandmembers apparently needed the rest, Bachmann said, because they
started to burn out from performing more than 200 shows a year. To ease the
pressure, Bachmann traveled during the hiatus, writing pieces of a few songs in
such faraway places as Newfoundland, Canada. Meanwhile, Johnson and
Price remained in the band's town of origin, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Gentling
returned to his hometown of Asheville, N.C.
In addition to recuperating, bandmembers worked at odd jobs during their
break: Price at a bike shop, Gentling chipping wood and de-limbing trees and
Bachmann as a medical courier near his home in Atlanta, delivering "eggs,
blood, semen, whatever."
The new album, Bachmann added, will be the Archers' last for Alias Records,
which released the group's three other full-length albums, as well as an EP.
And while the band doesn't have another specific label in mind, Bachmann said
he couldn't even say for sure that the Archers would make a fifth record. "When
we started, we said we would stop if we weren't having fun," he said. "We'll see
how we feel when we're done touring for this record."