American Football (1999)
by American Football

From JulianR TOP 100 COMMENTER 04/07/2018 07:03 | #212436 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

Ayyyyy! I finally GOT it! This album has seemed so dumb for me to me for so long. Dry, repetitive, bland, you name a criticism that has been stated below and I have had that opinion. But after just coming back to it again and again periodically, it finaly clicked, as all good albums do. There is something really seductive in the layered guitars and strangely static songwriting. The songs don't really go anywhere at all, and it can be hard to understand why at first. But I eventually realized that this album is just the musical distillation of small town life. The cover, the backstory, etc all point toward it, but even structure wise, it feels meandering and aimless, waiting for something to happen. But nothing ever does, and things are always the same, and yet you can't help but love your little nondescript cornfield town.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Talk Talk's later works and this album have both made their genius apparent to me around the same time. Though they are different in many ways, they both have a kind of featurelessness to them, as described a but above. They are unstructured and meandering, and if you are not listening attentively, it feels like the same thing over and over. But just as there is beauty in the use of silence by Talk Talk, there is beauty in the use of repetition by American Football.

80/100

an_outlaw, I'm sorry for your loss. It's an essential emo album and has nice post-rock instrumentation at points. The album cover is pretty neat because of the overlapping film and the words running over to the bottom looks cool. I like it.

The rest of the album feels sort of bland after the first three songs.

Favorite tracks: Never Meant, The Summer Ends

B

From Brad1770 TOP 100 COMMENTER 04/28/2018 06:54 | #213799 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

'American Football' by American Football BEA ranked 470 (April 2018)

A journey such as I'm on to listen to the BEA top 500 (twice) was always going to take me to musical places I would never have imagined and American Football is a great point in case

To understand American Football you need to appreciate their style of music . They are exponents of what is referred to a Math Rock a gene of music characterised by non-standard time signatures such as 7/8 , 11/8 or 13/8 producing a rhythmic complexity that is counter intuitive to rocks standard 4/4 . I explained it to a friend as "Rock Free-form Jazz Like " . And here in lies why there is such polarising opinions about this group/album . On first listen the listener is left confused with the free form irregular nature of the content , but repeat listens reveals a layered depth and musical skill not initially appreciated . I firmly believe many listeners dismiss this album after 1 or 2 listens , where as the enlightened ones go back and back and fully peal back the onion layers to reveal an inner beauty within this album

On a side note these boys really need to use some imagination with their release tiles , we have

1998: 'American Football' EP
1999: 'American Football' ( debut album)
2016: 'American Football' (follow up album)

ANYTHING would be a better title than 'American Football'
How about 'Free Form Rock In 11/8 ' ? or 'OK Maths' ?

Finally the Deluxe Version is pretty much garbage , you get 10 additional tracks all of which are extremely poor quality live , boom box recorded or demo quality tracks. If your a super fan check it out other wise stick to the original 9 track release

Polarising but good

65/100

From xMUSICSNOBx 02/22/2019 17:09 | #232376 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

Returned to this album recently and can't stop listening to it.

I wish I could delete my earlier comment, the regrets are killing me.