Trying to put American Football into a single genre box has always been a difficult task.
The Illinois-based band splices emo, jazz, math rock and post-rock all together into a bleary-eyed slurry that feels like it was recorded at the point where wakefulness becomes sleeping.
For the third time, the band has released a self-titled record — which, much like Weezer’s self-titled records, makes writing about them difficult.
But unlike Weezer’s often ill-conceived self-titled records, there feels like there’s a through-line across American Football’s records. The three “American Football” LPs feel interconnected, as if they were three chapters in an ever-expanding book.
This is especially extraordinary when considering that it wasn’t always this way; what’s been retroactively dubbed “LP1” was released in 1999, and the band wasn’t heard from again until the release of “LP2” in 2016. With “LP3” coming only three years later, it’s a bit surprising to think now, long after the height of emo’s popularity, we’re seeing the height of the creative output of one of emo’s favorite sons.
On “LP3,” the band maintains their trademark sound — one which music writers seem to have settled on describing as “twinkly” and I honestly can’t think of a better word than that anyway — but what’s apparent immediately from the opening moments of the album.
“Silhouettes,” the album’s opening cut, starts off with nothing but a glockenspiel, initially just playing a single repeating note out of the left channel of your speakers. Slowly, though, additional notes are added, swirling back and forth between the left and right channels, essentially creating a far more subdued version of the effect on the opening moments of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”
The song shoes off the band’s math rock inspiration; vocalist Mike Kinsella croons over what is truly a deceptively complicated drum section from Steve Lamos that serves as a counterpoint to the glockenspiel of Kinsella’s cousin, Nate Kinsella.
But unlike many, if not most, bands that stray into the left field that is math rock, American Football’s approach to the complicated time signatures associated with the genre is never abrasive; instead, the rhythms blend together into something hypnotic and dreamlike, only coming across as “complicated” after careful listening.
Oftentimes on “LP3,” though, American Football twinges more towards a radio-friendly pop rock sound, which is especially prominent on “Uncomfortably Numb,” a cheerfully morose ditty that features prominent vocals from Paramore front-woman Hayley Williams.
Simply put, the track is gorgeous. Kinsella and Williams serve as perfect vocal counterpoints to each other, and their vocals sort of sit nestled into the instrumentation, allowing it to encase them in a cocoon of warm guitar tones.
American Football makes good use of featured vocalists on the record, a first for the band, that’s done not just once but three times here. In addition to the Hayley Williams vocals, we also hear contributions from Land of Talk’s Elizabeth Powell and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell.
Goswell’s whispery contributions to the track “I Can’t Hear You” — which, in my opinion, has some of the most beautiful production on a record full of beautiful production — bring about the logical conclusion of American Football by adding shoegaze to their repertoire of genres. This track truly stands out from the others, focusing more on repetitive guitar parts in the oeuvre of shoegaze more than any other track on the record.
It’s American Football’s commitment to pushing the needle forward inch by inch that makes them such a great band. This isn’t a group that reinvents themselves from album to album; each album has only incrementally changed from the previous, creating a consistent listening experience across their records.
I hesitate to say which one of their records I enjoy most, since I feel more like it’s best to look at these albums as different parts of the same work. That being said, though, “LP3” is a worthy continuation of the work set out by previous entries into the American Football catalog, and is frequently breathtaking in its beauty.
