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Rating: 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.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
05 Crabwalk (03:32)
He reels around the nightclub
like the hubcaps off of a car
That just crashed into a sign that said
"This way to the nightclub."
He says you ain't worth a dime
to his life support systems
They still keep him talking
on the chance that he'll say something
Don't you feel the decks rolling
I think that we're on a stormy sea
I'm having trouble keeping down the light that I've stolen
He said, "Come on and do the crabwalk with me."
He's just trying to breathe some new life into the jukebox
But it doesn't take his crap it just keeps on staring back
And the quarters that he pours down its throat
Well they're just starting to get his goat
The song plays,
"I gave you everything and I never got anything back."
Don't you feel the decks rolling
I think that we're on a stormy sea
I'm having trouble keeping down the light that I've stolen
He said, "Come on and do the crabwalk with me."
He went fishing in the ocean
and all he got was a couple of tires
And they came up dripping with emotion
And you know how fisherman are liars
The five hundred thousand dollar country guitar
sits at home sad and lonely
No one has any pity for the life of the party
Don't you feel the decks rolling
I think that we're on a stormy sea
He's having trouble keeping down the light
that he's stolen
He said, "Come on and do the crabwalk with me."
08 The Dead Part of You (02:43)
The price of your soul is less than the cab fare
That gets you home before the living end
The dead part of you leaves me with a blessing
From a destruction of your beauty
Your self-hatred your self-pity
There's so little of you left
The dead part of you takes me out
And says the beast in me is fading fast
And leaves me with a great big goodbye hug
It's busy clinging to the dead part of the past
You only love one thing
And there's so little of it left
He has taken everything
And there's so little of you left
You're just a baby in the back seat
That a door slam sends crying into the world
And a cab driver's in a hurry that matters more than
More than anything we can hope for from the world
You only love one thing
And there's so little of it left
He has taken everything
And there's so little of you left
10 What the Pillar of Salt Held Up (02:37)
The take-off makes no sound
It's high and far away
Your blue sky by the moon
It takes my breath away
Why do you choose
What you choose to throw away into the undertow
A happiness like we'll never know
You can overcome Your bitterness and pain
And you don't remember how
To start your life again
You were born to please
Born to put on a show
But you always run away
From a happiness like we'll never know
No hiding place in all the sky
No camouflage to keep you warm at night
No clothes you got seem to keep out the wind or the rain
No way out from your shame
The take-off makes no sound
As you fly away with that look on your face
That gives it all away
Secrets that the sea would never tell the soul
But where the current flows
A happiness like we'll never know
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