Hi everyone! Bookthony Maxxtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new American Football Album, LP4. Or the self-titled fourth American Football Album. American Emo Legends American Football are back! With, yes, their fourth album.

It's their first record since 2019's third American Football self-titled album. A gap that doesn't really feel too long considering how much time it took to get the second American Football LP. Yeah, that record coincided with a comeback.

Now four albums deep after a comeback, American Football continues to be one of the most interesting anomalies in underground music. Illinois emo outfit forms in the 90s, puts out a debut album, and then years later dissolves in relative obscurity – only to gain a passionate cult following – and become so viral that the house on the front cover of the album has become stuff of legend.

And, and, and then inspire a new generation of young emo bands to follow a similarly midwestern blueprint. On top of American Football's popularity, now being treated as this ahistorical constant. As if there was always this level of interest in the band.

Now, I know that's a brief rundown and ignores pre-history and post-history, like the fantastic Cap'n Jazz, as well as, lead singer Mike Kinsella, for years after American Football, recording music under the name Owen, even to this day. But all of this doesn't make American Football's success story and eventual reformation any less interesting and unique, as well as the continued demand for new records. Even if the reformation and comeback has been a little mixed in the eyes and ears of many.

American Football's sound has changed pretty drastically from years ago, and has recently been leaning a lot more into production and instrumentation that has more of a dream pop flavor to it than just simply the gently mathy emo and slowcore they were once known for originally.

So as the story goes, I guess following LP3 American Football wanted to take a bit of a break, and serendipitously found one because, not too long after the tour that they had, the COVID-19 pandemic became a thing. And of course, back in 2021, drummer Steve Lamos parted ways with the band over some creative control tensions with Mike.

In the time since, brothers and bandmates Mike and Nate, focused on another one of their musical side projects, Lies, only for Lamos to eventually rejoin the band in 2023. At which point, I guess it seemed like time to start writing some new stuff for American Football, and teaming up with the producer that they were already linked up with for Lies.

While American Football's sound has always been driven by patient tempos, by gradual progressions, and twangy, spacious guitars, I would probably never categorize anything the band has done over its existence purely, or mostly as post-rock music. There are some parallels stylistically there for sure, but when I think about some of the greats and heavyweights in that style of music, I see their art in their accomplishments as being very different in tone from American Football.

However, I do think LP4 is the most post-rock-sounding album the band has dropped so far. From the guitar tones to the mixes and use of reverb to the slow-building crescendo points that are on many of these tracks. All of these characteristics take much more precedence over how these songs flow and how they feel than they have on any previous American Football album.

And it's a change of pace for sure, but in my opinion not necessarily a great one. Because I feel like a bulk of the material on this album sees American Football delivering really the same kinds of instrumental indie cliches that went out of fashion over a decade ago for good reason. Because they just started to get really bland, predictable, and stale.

For the most part, I just feel like American Football are giving us sounds and chord progressions and changes that were already very much perfected by artists like Mogwai on records such as Happy Songs for Happy People or Explosions in the Sky. And while it's cool that a band of American Football's visibility is giving this sound a little bit more new life and exposure, personally, I've never wondered what this sound would feel like if the progressions were more lacking. Or if the guitars were faintly more emo.

And let's face it, we are not getting debut album quality American Football guitar work here. Not, not those kinds of licks. Also, I've never really wondered what this style of rock music would sound like if it were complemented with vibraphone. A lot of vibraphone, actually. And vocals that sound like the singing of a Disney prince with a mortgage and a Zoloft prescription.

I mean, there are some interesting variations to be found across the tracklist of this record, for sure. Be it either the surprising features from shoegaze and dream pop outfit Wisp or Brendan Yates of Turnstile fame. The plucky staccato strings on Blood on My Blood were definitely a welcome changeup for sure, too.

Maybe the most interesting instrumental passages come by way of the opening track, whose second half has this thunderous, droning, low end to it that's very ominous and very heavy, but eventually sort of dissipates kind of unceremoniously, as if we are seeing these spent rain clouds just kind of disappear out of nowhere.

So again, my problem with this record isn't that it's one-dimensional necessarily. It's more that it's baseline sonics are just painfully unimaginative, with a lot of the songwriting kind of dragging on much of the time, too. Plus, with all of these additional ornamental pieces of instrumentation and sound, like on "Patron Saint of Pale", for example, which features these kind of hope-core, indie-pop, bright group vocals, claps, heavier vibraphone passages, and piano, sometimes it really does feel like Mike and company are just throwing whatever at the wall to see what sticks. Not that additional layers or details are a bad thing or pointless, but they don't really bring that much life to these average guitar arpeggios and inoffensively groovy drum passages.

One thing I will compliment this album on is that occasionally you do kind of get that old-school, pained vocal performance from Kinsella, where his delivery does really cut deep emotionally. The best example of this coincides with some of the most tragic writing on the entire record in the second half of the track "Bad Moons." It's clear that Mike's recent divorce has given him a lot to meditate on, think about, write about, and generally speaking, I will say that lyricism is maybe the biggest selling point of this record.

But as good and as poetic and as unfiltered as that element of this album is, it often feels at odds with how safe and predictable the music runs, outside of maybe a short, discordant passage or two that feels a little unnerving. The rest of it, again, is very toothless, very average post-rock that I could hear done better on any number of albums, which is why I'm feeling about a light five on this record.

Anthony Fantano, American Football, forever.