American Football Is Still Making Magic

The band American Football released their fourth self-titled LP in May. They are no longer the band they were in the late ’90s, when their debut EP and album somehow developed a cult status that has endured to this day. Today they are a middle-aged band making a much more adult imagining of emo music. LP4 is soft, wistful, jazzy indie-rock music with singer Mike Kinsella deep and tender vibrato working on an ASMR level as well as a lyrical one. It’s one of the best releases of the year, specifically because it is largely incongruous with any other music being made. It is patient, smooth, and mature, a true, properly sequenced album that is more than the sum of its parts. It is not necessarily a record out of time, as much as its beyond timeliness. It is lost in its world and asks you to get lost with it, which is one of the defining qualities of all of American Football’s music.

If you were to ask an American Football fan what makes that first album from 1999 so magical, they’d likely struggle to put it into words. I don’t think even the band could explain it to you. It’s a credit to them that they’ve never really tried to replicate it. In Ian Cohen’s Pitchfork review of the record, he writes about the band’s, and that particular album’s, special appeal:

Very little of American Football is in a minor key and almost none of it can be performed on a single guitar, so it’s not explicitly heartbroken music, nor is it ever entirely joyous. Rather than pinpoint an emotion, the record exists on a continuum. There’s no right answer as to whether “The Summer Ends” is a devotional, a last goodbye, or some combination of the two—the ache and beauty are intertwined.