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Archers Of Loaf are just another in a continuing series of bands who have had the cables attached to their neck bolts and after a jolt of electricity, staggered off the laboratory bench and back into existence. Depending on your appetite for nostalgia (a song that they played), this can be viewed as either a welcome trend or a pitiful water treading exercise.
I’ve been on both sides of that divide, but in the case of Archers, I didn’t have a dog in this particular fight. In retrospect seems kinda weird, but I never bought a record from them after I got their debut 7” on the extremely short-lived Stay Free label. Armed with little more than a cursory understanding of their sound, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of energy and vigor they had on stage. Singer/guitarist Eric Bachmann turned down in Crooked Fingers, his post-Loaf project, but tonight he would use his well-seasoned voice to bellow out the near two dozen songs tonight.
Visually, it’s a dichotomy with the towering and mostly staid Bachmann flanked on his left by the diminutive but energetic Mike Gentling on bass. It took a bit for the crowd to warm up, but when they did it was a convincing effort. Boston crowds can be a bit of a laid-back bunch, but something about the Middle East’s basement setting gets the adrenaline flowing where the same band in a different venue just can’t, for whatever reason. It just feels like a rock show when you are down in that room, and crowd surfers appeared here and there throughout the rest of the show. It wasn’t all rockers, and “Dead Red Eyes” was a true high point of the show, with Bachmann sitting and playing a keyboard.
For a band coming out of North Carolina during the ’90s, it’s not a surprise that they took note of and absorbed some of their peers, with “Fabricoh” (Superchunk) and “What Did You Expect?” (Polvo) as prime examples of this. They learned well, and brought their own spin on it too. Fantastic show.
Pipe is another band shaken from dormancy, and they also share Tar Heel origins; heck, the first record they did was a split with Small that had Bachmann signing on it, so obviously there are ties that go back a ways. Simply put, Pipe rocked and rocked hard, with a lot more punk rock to their sound than I was expecting. Singer Ron Liberti was manic, but in a fun way, not a “holy shit, keep an eye on the exits” sort of way. How menacing can a guy be who wears a red cardigan on stage? This was a perfect pairing of bands.
Openers Hundred Visions hailed from Texas, but I didn’t detect any sort of regional music dialect in their music. They played well and had some nice riffs going on, but when it was over there was nothing memorable about the songs, and when Pipe hit the stage it was clear who was the seasoned band and who wasn’t.
Archers’ set list can be seen here and more photos of all the bands can be seen at my site
