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Rating: The new American Football is ugly. It doesn't make sense to exist.
Then let's discuss if it's right/wrong to give a cutting opinion on the first listen. Which is actually the second, because while I'm writing, it started over again.
For now, I'm not changing my mind. The first song starts, and the church bells start. When the major arpeggios are so predictable, the effect is like church bells. Mike Kinsella sings as he does in his Owen project: he has the vibrato. The vibrato on American Football isn't right.
Behind-under Kinsella, there are indeed the American Football. Harmonics, relentless arpeggios. But if you, like me, loved the '99 album, you more or less realize that the emotional impact was made by the little phrases, the trumpet, the open structures. Not the arpeggios alone, not even the harmonics.
In Never Meant, there was the little phrase, in Honestly, there were the riff and open structure, in Summer Ends, there was the trumpet. The jingle jangle arpeggio made structure, but it wasn't the protagonist. It relaxed and created sound, but it wasn't everything. Now it's more or less everything.
Almost, almost, the miracle happens on Everyone Is Dressed Up, clearly the best track. But Mike Kinsella sings too forward. And they didn't record on four tracks and thanks a lot, because recording on four tracks was for kids with a side project to relax and to say something about their feelings that was less aggressive than the hormonal hc stuff. That's what American Football was. With verses stretched or sweetly torn. Like on this record, but more inspired, sung worse. Where singing worse was singing better.
You grow, change, mature: it would be ridiculous if at forty you sing and play the same as twenty years ago, when you were just a kid.
Even we who listen are no longer those kids.
Or we who listen are still those kids, because none of us fully embraced American Football in '99, come on. We got into it at least ten years later, and there was heavy musical internet, there was the cult thing of you-have-to-listen-to-it, rate your music, milestones, 9/10.
And so for those of us who got into it that way, and are still into it, this record doesn't make sense, it doesn't exist.
Worse than growing up and changing is trying to pretend it didn't happen. Which is also a banal concept, like laughing behind the symptoms of midlife crises when you're young and brash.
This record doesn't exist and doesn't make sense even for those who listened to it in time.
Maturity is beautiful if shared, otherwise, it's just alienating. If you were in love with her at twenty and for twenty years you've grown with her, maybe, in the most romantic notion, you don't care if her butt falls and the rest, because of that look and shared experiences and everything. I suppose. If you were in love and see her again for the first time after twenty years and you're a cynical, critical jerk like me and a lot of people, you immediately think oh damn, what a shame, her butt fell.
American Football hasn't matured with their audience: their audience fell in love, saw other things grow like Owen which anyway damn are not American Football, and now they face this thing.
With the falling butt and the thong.
Let's say it doesn't exist, let's keep a nice memory.
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