Review Summary: First thought, best thought..
I've never been a particular fan of music that falls under the umbrella of 'indie,' and for the most part, what I do like about it is also what gradually weans me off its bands and albums. It carries tints of callow nostalgia and this maimed snottiness that after repeat listens becomes too wispy and humdrum to me. By the same measure, music by bands like Pavement, Red Red Meat, Archers of Loaf, Superchunk and scores of others have created a gauzy dreamland of American college campus life that sounds dated and hollowed in the face of today's realities.
Archers of Loaf have long been plagued by unfavorable comparisons to Pavement, but that's just an occupational hazard that everyone in a scene suffers when its golden child has been picked, arbitrarily or otherwise. Everything about this album plays well on paper and on first listens. The vocals are nice and raspy, the guitars squeal and saw when needed, and play it mellow without becoming maudlin.
Icky Mettle puts its best foot forward right out of the gate. Web in Front is the first song here, and it is a gem to end all gems, perhaps the best song to have come out of that decade's Midwestern/North-Eastern glut of first wave indie music. The album hits almost as hard soon after with Wrong, though that song never gets as ardent as when the opening riff and first verse rush you. The album then sags drastically and exponentially, made leaden by songs with undercooked middles, choruses that trail off nowhere and lyrics that stop being ironical or cheeky and turn caustic. None of these things really have to make for a bad record, and in the hands of another more avant-garde or able band, this could have maybe passed as improvisational or nihilistic flare. Or maybe Web in Front is just so goddamn good, the album never regains its footing.
Archers of Loaf would continue being critical, if not commercial darlings of college radio and wizened music critics. Vee Vee, their sophomore effort, would become knows as their finest moment. And it has some damn good songs on it. But none of it would be as pure and sparkling and heady as that first song. The band's subsequent albums would see it slowly mellow and morph into what Eric Bachmann would continue with Crooked Fingers, a country-tinged soft rock band whose music for the most part is as bland as the genre's name might suggest.
Mind you, a lot of this is personal speculation and a matter of taste and mind framework. I have a playlist of bands of that period and of that ilk that runs 150 songs deep, and Web in Front is the opening track there as well. It always will be. But the rest of Icky Mettle, much as the rest of the band's discography has been relegated to that music that I decide to give another go every few years, thinking there was something there I missed, or if I'd become more attuned to it from circumstance. It will likely stay that way. But it's a hell of a song, and with all things balanced and chewed and rechewed, worth the price of admission alone.
