American Football
EP

10 minutes of magic.

Three songs that evoke old happy memories without needing to be part of them.

An album that creates a corner of peace anytime and anywhere it is played: two guitars, a drum kit, and Mike Kinsella's fragile and uneven vocals are the only ingredients. The music is a hypnotic weave of arpeggios that captures and carries away, with the drums, sometimes just gently tapped, giving the pieces perfect dynamism. Major, minor arpeggios, harmonics, and barely suggested dissonances; snare, tom, hi-hat, bass drum: it's just enough to create the ideal soundtrack for a memory, any one, happy or sad. A refuge from the daily grind, an excursion to the place where the project you are working on, the books you are studying, will lose all significance.

An unjustly overlooked masterpiece by most (although, at least for me, maybe it's better this way) that saw the light in 1998, a year before the band's first and only LP, which captures the same atmospheres but has the flaw, when compared to this EP, of being too long and somewhat exhausting overall, while still remaining a rare gem in the flat musical landscape at the turn of the centuries.

Three songs, "The One With the Tambourine", "Letters and Packages", "Five Sent Miles", that manage to be elaborate and minimalist at the same time, in a never obsessive repetitiveness: a numbing repetitiveness that extends time and leaves an inevitable sense of emptiness when, suddenly, the 10 minutes end. And the magic exhausts itself.