Eric Bachmann

North Carolina native Eric Bachmann issued his first solo album under the title Short Careers, though his path through music stretched far beyond any abbreviated span. Starting in the early 1990s with indie rock band Archers of Loaf, the onetime Appalachian State University saxophone major shaped an unyielding commitment to independent rock across successive eras. That group steadily cultivated a devoted cult audience via releases such as All the Nations Airports and White Trash Heroes. Even before Archers of Loaf disbanded in the late 1990s, Bachmann had already launched the Barry Black side project and established his long-running dark songwriting alias Crooked Fingers. His recorded output stayed prolific and steady through the 2000s and 2010s under both the Crooked Fingers name and his own.

Archers of Loaf’s 1993 debut Icky Mettle delivered a mix of white noise, Pavement-style guitar pop, and loopy lyrics that echoed the force of Chapel Hill’s other underground powerhouse, Superchunk. In 1995 Bachmann started the instrumental Barry Black project with producer Caleb Southern and put out two LPs. The band completed three additional studio albums before calling it quits in 1998, closing the chapter with the posthumous live set Seconds Before the Accident.

Crooked Fingers, Bachmann’s leaner follow-up endeavor, arrived in 2000 with a self-titled debut that fused folk, indie, and Americana in a dark-hued palette. Bring on the Snakes, the project’s slightly more optimistic second album, appeared the next year. Bachmann released Short Careers, his first proper solo collection, in 2002; the entirely instrumental record marked his initial film-scoring work, supplying the soundtrack to the independent movie Ball of Wax, which follows an evil baseball player consumed by greed. In summer 2006 he issued his second solo album, the sparse and powerful To the Races. For the remainder of the decade Crooked Fingers served as his chief outlet, culminating with Breaks in the Armor in 2011. A gifted multi-instrumentalist, Bachmann joined Neko Case’s touring band in 2013 while continuing to compose new material under his own name. In early 2016 he released his third solo effort, a self-titled LP on Merge Records, and announced he would retire the Crooked Fingers project to focus exclusively on solo work. In late 2018 he returned with the sparse and somewhat despairing collection No Recover.