Archers of Loaf: Vee Vee (Reissue)

Rating: 4.5/5  

Archers of Loaf were courted by at least one major label in 1995 after the release of Vee Vee, the band’s sophomore full length and their most commercially successful album to date. To a certain extent it makes sense that a major would have found Vee Vee attractive, as a few of its songs would have fit in well with the alt-rock mindset that defined the mid 1990s. This pursuit would ultimately become little more than a curious piece in the band’s history though: the Archers remained with Alias Records, and their involvement with a major would be limited to a distribution deal with Elektra for their third LP, 1996’s All the Nation’s Airports.

After listening to Merge’s incredible reissue of Vee Vee, it seems even more surprising that a big bucks label came knocking at all. With their uneasy mix of melody and guitar-bass-drums rock noise, coupled with oblique/evasive/insightful/incomprehensible lyrics and Eric Bachmann’s rough vocals, the Archers were never really mainstream material, even for an audience that had been eased into various distillations of indie rock via Nirvana and other lesser bands. Indeed, for every radio-friendly song like “Underdogs of Nipomo” or “Floating Friends,” there were far more songs a la “The Worst Has Yet to Come” and “Nostalgia:” short, aggravated blasts of tension and nastiness too coarse for FM consumption.

Vee Vee has typically been viewed as an abstract indie rock record about the state of modern music, particularly in songs like “Nevermind the Enemy,” “Greatest of All Time,” “Fabricoh” and “Let the Loser Melt.” With mentions of drowned musicians and earlobes tacked to radios and lyrics like “the underground is overcrowded” – likely the most quoted Bachmann lyric – it’s easy to see why, but this depiction shortchanges the album. “Harnessed in Slums” is the closest the band came to an anthem, a propulsive burst of aggression that, along with Icky Mettle’s “Web In Front,” is probably the best single the band did. Later the band upends the song’s violent streak in the album-closing “Underachievers March and Fight Song,” whose whistles and buoyant vibe might possibly make it the most non-threatening call to arms ever. Elsewhere, references to crime, murder, sex, drugs and death are scattered liberally, most pointedly in “Death in the Park,” resulting in an album whose subject matter extends far beyond that of the insular music world.

At the time they were sometimes (unfairly) derided as a junior version of Pavement, but in hindsight what Bachmann, Eric Johnson, Matt Gentling and Mark Price produced in the 1990s now stands as some of the most enduring music any band from that era mustered. Rounded out with a bonus disc that includes singles and a nice number of lo-fi demos, with fresh perspective Vee Vee actually sounds the equal of Icky Mettle and should further cement the band’s bona fides. The band’s recent reunion has afforded Archers of Loaf the obligatory rounds of applause they didn’t always get the first time around, and for both fans and newcomers alike, Merge’s latest reissue comes highly recommended. Created in a period when large piles of then-masterpieces today sound hopelessly irrelevant and forever shackled to a specific time and place, Vee Vee’s shelf life appears to be limitless.