American Football "Covers" LP

THIS IS A PREORDER. IT SHIPS MID OCTOBER

Any orders containing a "Pre-Order" item will ship together when the pre-order ships. Please make a separate order if you wish to receive non pre-order items before the pre-order ship date.

Frosted Glass vinyl. 

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. - "I’ll See You When We're 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’s 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’s opening rendition of “Never Meant,” Sam Beam’s singular falsetto pealing like an apology, hoping to pull his lover back toward a relationship’s 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’s happening. Doom is a foregone conclusion. It is beautiful and tragic, every scene of being together rendered as a pure hypothetical.