With All the Nations Airports, Archers of Loaf did not compromise its efforts to push itself in new directions. The band delivered an album that included the straightforward indie-rock songs that had made them famous, interspersed with instrumental tracks, layered tape loops, and even a solo piano song. Although the songs’ structures became much more complex and provided a wide range of color and emotion, none of the tracks seemed out of place on the album.
In Stephen Thompson’s liner notes for the Airports reissue, he says, “It’s music that exists because it must, with all the bile, beauty, and bluster of youth and all the disaffected paranoia of a perpetually worried mind. The album might not have fulfilled Archers of Loaf’s commercial potential at the time, but that makes an awful lot of sense. The band tended to craft its greatest art when it saw fit to scribble in the margins.”