With All the Nations Airports, originally released in 1996, Archers of Loaf
were uncompromising in their efforts to push themselves in new directions.
They delivered an album that included some of the more simple indie pop
songs that had made them famous as well as four instrumental tracks,
layered tape loops and even a solo piano song, but the song structures
became much more complex. These songs provided a wide range of color
and emotion but somehow none of the songs seemed out of place on the
album.
In Stephen Thompson’s liner notes for the Airports reissue, he says, “It’s
music that exists because it must, with all the bile, beauty, and bluster of
youth and all the disaffected paranoia of a perpetually worried mind. The
album might not have fulfilled Archers of Loaf’s commercial potential at
the time, but that makes an awful lot of sense. The band tended to craft its
greatest art when it saw fit to scribble in the margins.”
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