"By the fall of 1999, the members of American Football were done with college, with emo, and with American Football itself. The trio had decided to break up even before the release of their first full-length; thus, the album turned out to be a farewell from a band that had scarcely introduced itself. American Football was also a rebuke of the Midwestern scene that had been shaped by the incalculable long-tail influence of Mike Kinsella’s previous one-album supernova Cap’n Jazz, rerouting emo’s bloodline from hardcore toward minimalist jazz and meditiative math-rock. [...] After the bursting of the Myspace bubble, hundreds of bands took Kinsella’s elliptical expressions of hope and heartbreak as unfinished business, rebuilding the genre on a foundation of open-tuned Telecasters, capos, and red and black flannels. Yet, while the sound of American Football is remarkably easy to replicate, its spirit of wistful carpe diem remains forever elusive."