"Reason In Decline": Archers Of Loaf are back!

One-time indie slackers confront a changed world a quarter- century after split 

Archers Of Loaf broke up in 1998, but an exploratory 2020 reunion that yielded the elegiac “Raleigh Days” convinced singer/guitarist Eric Bachmann and his erstwhile bandmates to recommit. 

The resulting Reason In Decline juxtaposes the Big Country-like clangour of “Saturation And Light” with furious punk rave-ups like “Misinformation Age”, on which Bachmann, testing his surgically repaired vocal cords, bellows about dark days and demagogues. 

The 51-year-old family man’s struggles with depression and anxiety bring unrelenting urgency to the album, most explicitly in “Mama Was A War Profiteer”.

Only in “Aimee”, a gentle ode to a lasting relationship, does Bachman find solace.