These Americans apparently have a very limited grasp of their own national history-- it begins with Slay Tracks and ends with Slanted and Enchanted. I can only presume that "early" refers to the early '90s, an era that saw the brief rise and quick fall of the nebulous genre known as "lo-fi" and/or "slacker-rock." Aha! Airmen Secretly comes on like a missive from some anonymous basement in 1992, all pliable guitar fuzz, cryptic mumblings and ugly cover art. This, of course, still makes it a fairly intriguing find, quasi-nostalgic appeal aside.

Slacker-rock's primary virtue has always been its refusal to provide any sort of context for itself. It's an art form equivalent to handwritten screeds posted on telephone poles by paranoid schizophrenics, or rambling answering machine messages left by drunk people unaware they dialed the wrong number-- while it may not make any sense to you, you can take some solace in the fact that it wouldn't make sense to anyone else either. And yet even the most banal of communications can take on a perversely poetic quality, as the listener can't help ascribing his or her own arbitrary meaning to it.

This power of anonymity can apply to any music-- just think of how many times you've been blown away by a band you've never heard of before-- but slacker-rock seeks to preserve this mystique beyond the initial encounter by remaining defiantly obscure. The higher-profile faces in this crowd (Beck, Guided by Voices, and, of course, Pavement) inevitably lost a bit of their edge as they gained more exposure, turning their obscurity into an endearing mannerism at best. Their less well-known cohorts maintain the tradition in fine form; bands such as Home, Wingtip Sloat, and Pie will be forever marginalized (albeit contentedly), and their music will be known only by the select few fortunate enough to stumble unwittingly across them. The Early Americans fall squarely into the latter category, but even in this secret corner of rock history they're still just a footnote.

With song titles like "Kings of Cough Syrup," "Avenues are the Arteries" and especially "I Will Be Obtuse Forever," Aha! Airmen Secretly works that unhip-amateur angle for all it's worth. Two guitarists skilled in drunken-master kung fu create a clanging, effects-drenched din while the drummer bangs on a busted kit a few rooms away. There's a lot of shaky singing and yelling about how "life is like trigonometry" and "are you ever sure that the movies aren't watching you?" "All Signs of a Storm" and "Literary Menace" most directly recall Pavement's warped looseness, and "Mayflowers" has some lineage back to the angularity of the Fall or Gang of Four. But overall, the Early Americans don't really sound like anyone else-- or anything much at all.

For all their careening and roaring, there isn't a whole lot to distinguish them from the other trillion bands buried permanently below radar. The few scraps of melody are like driftwood to cling to in the ocean of noise; eventually you just get tired and allow yourself to drown in the miasma. There is a certain inventiveness at work within this album, but still, I wouldn't expect any future bursts of brilliance from them.

-Nick Mirov