Nineties or Noughties Music You've Just Gotten Into

[Satchmo Distel]

I really like this album by American Football, whom I'd never previously heard of (was I totally out of touch or were they obscure?)

My neglect of P.J. Harvey was just silly:

[Simon G]

I heard of American Football around 8-9 years ago. I've a feeling I read about them on here, but I can't be 100% certain on that. If I remember correctly they were a college band who recorded and released one album before they all moved on with their separate lives. No idea if that's true though.

Never Meant is such a great song and the rest of the album isn't bad either.

EDIT: It was December 2014 when I first heard about them on another football forum. This was the post about them:

Band in college release one album then break up. Album becomes a cult hit, and in the following 15 years it becomes more and more influential until there's an entire sub-genre essentially copying what they did in 1999. The band has reunited to milk their fame, and why not? I CBA to write too much about the album, and these guys would honestly do it better anyway:


'“Honestly I can’t remember all my teenage feelings and their meanings.” Any list of Great Moments in Emo Lyricism would be incomplete without this curious Mike Kinsella-sung line during “Honestly?”, the third track from American Football’s only album, released in 1999. But really...honestly? We are, after all, talking about a genre assumed to be in constant contact with the feelings of teendom—but the next line gives more context: “They seem too/ See-through/ To be true.” Rather than someone cutting themselves off from or invalidating their own teenage feelings, Kinsella’s just outside that time frame trying to figure out how the emotions and music that moved him during his formative years figure into his current life. That’s why, as self-identifying emo bands are making music that’s more mature, refined, and exploratory than anything that came before it, American Football is currently the most influential album in the genre.' - Pitchfork

'The best moments of American Football occur when the band’s relatability and their development of the genre become obvious, especially in the intimate conclusion of “Stay Home”. Kinsella and Holmes’ guitars, influenced by both post-rock and math rock, weave between and double each other in various tempos and tunings, producing a uniquely gorgeous world for the lyrics to inhabit. While bass occasionally enters the picture, American Football sounds full and playful without, their instruments able to relate what words can’t.' - Consequence of Sound

'American Football’s lone album opens with the sound of disaster: a jumble of arpeggiated guitar, a messy drum fill, and then a voice in the distance calling out, “We ready?” The garbled noise that introduces “Never Meant” wasn’t American Football’s attempt to misrepresent its skills; it’s merely the product of three University Of Illinois students chronicling their time together before they moved away and the band ended. But, regardless of what American Football’s goals actually were, its debut album would go on to revitalize the emo underground, becoming a go-to reference for young, underground bands for the next decade-plus.' - AVClub

'Where bands like American Football are concerned, a major purpose of any kind of reissue is simply to try to expose your music to a wider audience than previously; given their all-too-brief lifespan first time around, they probably couldn’t have managed a more comprehensive retrospective than they have here, with every drop squeezed out of their modest back catalogue. The original record, as a perfectly-pitched, emo mood piece, stands up magnificently to the ravages of the intervening fifteen years; I flatly refuse to be swept along by over-excitement at the reunion, but there’s no question that the music that American Football did produce is as close to timeless as modern indie gets.' - TheLineOfBestFit

'Every song here manages to sound meticulously constructed without diminishing the easy, often dreamlike feel of the album. The record is defined by a sense of possibility and youthful discovery, and stands out not just as an anomalistic emo-jazz hybrid but as a lasting, iconic statement in the often blurry history of independent music' - AllMusic

[Walter Knight]

Can't remember how, but I recently learned Gaelle Adisson did the vocals on Wamdue Project's King Of My Castle. This led me to her mid-00s album Transient, which is great.

https://youtu.be/wLspmbVEvho?si=TPpy6IF1JP6i1yku