American Music Club
Everclear

THE REVIEW

American Music Club. A name that can inspire sadness in many ways. Listening to the music, of course, it's known that Mark Eitzel is one who has always poured his life and that of his friends into his songs, his drinking binges, his sudden breakups, his compassion for friends consumed by AIDS or lost in the tunnel of the usual, invincible existential crisis. But even simply knowing that name implies letting oneself be enveloped by a certain inevitable sadness. For the end of a band (with a reunion in 2005, the result of which I’m not familiar with) ultimately defeated by creative differences and the lack of the success it rightfully deserved, for bravery and quality. This is what inspires the most incurable melancholy, seeing a band like AMC crushed by misunderstanding.

Yet they left behind a number of inspired and heartfelt albums: starting with "The Restless Stranger," an album of practically repudiated suicidal atmospheres by the band in which there are still traces of punk and new wave, moving through "Engine" and "California" where the band anchored its sound to a spectral and shadowy folk-rock infused with rather pronounced psychedelic influences. These are troubled and shady works, hardly accessible. With "Everclear," however, things change quite radically: Eitzel and company (Mark "Vudi" Pankler on guitar, Bruce Kaphan as a multi-instrumentalist, Dan Pearson on bass, and Tim Mooney on drums) compose overall a less musically introverted album than its predecessors and more relaxed on listening, although by no means more optimistic or sunny: "Rise" echoes the epic and martial anthems of the '80s U2, with that emphatic and shouted chorus, "Crabwalk" is a vigorous and driving country rock, and "The Dead Part Of You" is a bitter outcry of Eitzel on acoustic guitar streaked by almost noise flares of electric guitar. These are fragile and loaded with painful pathos, yet incredibly catchy, they imprint themselves in the mind with surprising ease. Not to mention "Why Won’t You Stay," the peak of this accessibility far from detrimental, almost a nightclub ballad where Eitzel’s subdued and melancholic singing accompanies a gently instrumental base, almost sotto voce.

But the band's dramaturgy also finds refuge in less penetrable tracks, more square in their tremendous depression: "Miracle On 8th Street" is dominated by a shy acoustic guitar melody upon which the tense ringing of cymbals and bass drum, along with Eitzel’s stifled voice (close to death or simply tears) and the sinisterly present keyboards in the background create almost a sound painting of existential melancholy, together with "The Confidential Agent" (psychedelic and dark, distant relative to the U2 of "The Unforgettable Fire") undoubtedly the most emotionally charged song of the album, but the real stab in the stomach, emotionally speaking, is "Sick Of Food," a ballad that begins in their usual understated style, almost zombie-like, to then conclude in an angry and desperate ending where Eitzel declares "Now I wake up and I don't have any gravity." The lyrics fully reflect the music's atmospheres, stories of introversion and solitude where alcohol, romantic disappointments, and illness play a predominant role, indeed texts leopardianly linked to an idea of the impossibility of redemption which later Eitzel, now devoted to a solo career, would synthesize in a line from his "Are You The Trash": "evil gets what it wants." Perhaps evil wanted AMC to cease to exist. It got its way.

The guys got a nice revenge, a couple of years ago... waiting to hear something new from them, I refer you to this "Everclear." Just like the last "Love Songs For Patriots," the fruit of the aforementioned reunion, and like every single album of their tragically ignored career, a true "challenge to the darkness”, as the old Hank said. Until next time.