American Football - Covers [CD]

1. Iron & Wine - "Never Meant"
2. Blondshell - "The Summer Ends"
3. Novo Amor & Lowswimmer - "Honestly?"
4. Ethel Cain - "For Sure"
5. Yvette Young - "You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon"
6. Girl Ultra - "But the Regrets Are Killing Me"
7. M.A.G.S. - "Ill See You When Were Both Not So Emotional"
8. Manchester Orchestra - "Stay Home"
9. John McEntire - "The One With the Wurlitzer"

Alongside and in celebration of American Football (25th Anniversary Edition) arrives American Football (Covers), an ingeniously programmed set that highlights not only the way American Football fueled an eventual “emo revival,” but also and perhaps more important how their songs and sounds infiltrated and inspired so many corners of music. From string-swept and imaginative folk to idiosyncratic international pop, from intricate instrumental splendor to open-road shoegaze wonder, (Covers) traces—or at least teases—the endless ways the source material has cut across borders of generation, genre, and geography. It affirms just how important the nine songs three college kids cut in four days remain.

Kinsella lyrics on American Football were specific in detail but vague in situation. What we knew was that a relationship was collapsing with less animosity than regret, a sense of future nostalgia shaping words that asked how an ex-couple might feel as the summer passed and they maybe saw each other again. This framework, then, is a perfect invitation for different singers to climb inside and find their own interpretation. There is, for instance, a sweet sense of hope to Iron & Wine opening rendition of “Never Meant,” Sam Beam singular falsetto pealing like an apology, hoping to pull his lover back toward a relationship center. Ethel Cain, meanwhile, lingers and wallows in the uncertainty of the paradoxically titled “For Sure.” Above long, soft drones and guitars that twinkle like stars being extinguished forever, she settles into this song about never really knowing what happening. Doom is a foregone conclusion. It is beautiful and tragic, every scene of being together rendered as a pure hypothetical.

In one of the most faithful interpretations here, M.A.G.S. borrows the bitterness and conviction of “Ill See You When Were Both Not So Emotional,” less a break-up song than a reckoning with the breaks reality sometimes requires. His keyboard-traced and drum-driven version is sweet but sharp, a reminder that a stop can be an act of self-care. Blondshell slinks into a similar realization during “The Summer Ends,” taking shelter beneath a haze of multi-tracked harmonies and circular guitars to wonder what its going to take to move toward happiness—for herself and her partner, either together or apart. “Both been so unhappy,” she sings faintly after a fever breaks. “So lets just see what happens/when summer ends.” Appropriate for a band who could never have predicted what the future held for these songs, American Football is about not knowing what up ahead. Each band here sings that eternal plight in their own tone and tongue.

When American Football wrote and recorded these nine songs in 1999, they were also punk kids who were becoming interested in jazz and modern classical. The touchstones that always appear are Miles Davis, Steve Reich, and The Sea and Cake, but the bigger lesson is their interest in engaging other textures and approaches than distortion and drive. That clear in the sparkling guitars and shifting rhythms, in the traces of trumpet and whiffs of keys. And it is obvious on (Covers) in the assorted shapes these songs take.

Though never forsaking the tune itself, Manchester Orchestra imbue “Stay Home” with Reich pulsing repetition and Electric Miles opalescent glow. They find a way to reconnect the song to its burgeoning references. Yvette Young, of Covet, uses webs of guitar, layers of granular synthesis, and lines of mercurial strings to turn the once-skeletal “You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon” into a lush world. And there at the end, John McEntire, busy back in 1999 scheming Tortoise Standards and The Sea and Cake Oui, routes “The One With the Wurlitzer” into a Motorik anthem. It feels as emotionally unsure as all of American Football, the beat pushing forever forward while the bittersweet keys seem to turn backward, staring off at what might have been.

On the sidewalk outside of the famous house on the cover of American Football, several lines mark where Chris Strong likely stood when he snapped the photo. They are invitations to capture the scene, just as Strong did in 1999. But on the cover of (Covers), nine different images show the home during subsequent phases of the night, the glow from the upstairs window eventually overrunning the frame. That more fun than a mere replication, the same lesson that this compilation holds: Eschewing mimics for acts that took a little bit of American Football and made their own way, (Covers) is a testament to the imagination not only of the original but to those who continue to find it twenty-five years after the band assumed they were done.