My Instincts Are the Enemy by American Football
American Football. They back. My first thought when I heard about it was we were just gonna get more Owen music. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I love Owen, but with a band as iconic as this you find yourself wanting more of the same. And we kindof got both here - it’s like American Football plus Owen’s plain and bare self-deprecation, or Owen plus OG American Football’s jazz influenced polyrhythms and plinky geometric guitar doodles over and through it --- and you know, it works.
This is the most American-Football-y track to me because the guitars are at their plinkyest - you can just see them in a room riffing meditatively over each other, piecing these Tetris arrangements together, which according to a great Song Exploder ep is their actual process - and also some of the best aging sad-sack lyricism on the record. And about the lyrics - throughout the album you’re unlikely to think the lyrics are deep or cool or whatever. But if you listen to them, and if you’re being honest with yourself, the honestly of them, the straight-faced introspection, are things you feel that you wish you could express. It’s easy to be emo when you’re a kid, when you’re 20 and jamming in the basement, a raw nerve. It’s harder, and braver, to do it when you’re old and are supposed to be all bottled up.
“This is me, reaching out to you publicly” is a lyric on I’ve Been So Lost For So Long, also on this LP. That’s what all of this is, and it’s almost too rich a meal to digest, to much a luxury to wallow like this. The perspective of an adult delivered with the honestly of a kid.
