Posted by: Johnny Loftus on April 8, 2008 at 5:00 pm
American Music Club, The Golden Age (Merge, 2008)
Listen: “The Decibels and the Little Pills”
[audio:http://www.detour-mag.com/audio/TheDecibelsandtheLittlePills.mp3]
Golden Age is Mark Eitzel and American Music Club’s second album for Merge after taking a really long break. (About a decade, actually.) But did they ever really leave? In that interim, songs like “Blue and Grey Shirt” (from the stark, incredible 1988 effort California) or subsequent albums like Everclear and Mercury, those impressionistic portraits of how to be loved or lonely in a huge country, that stuff just settled in even more, like a painting you’d look at for years in your hallway and sigh every time. Having a new record from the group just seems natural, as it always has.
And natural is how easily a song like “All My Love” seems to flow out of Eitzel. His quiet ache of a voice is always lost somewhere between infatuation and hate — he’s always in a relationship but floating above it in analysis, too. “You woke up just in time for the sunset, you said ‘Let’s all go to the big rock show’,” he sings on “The Decibels and the Little Pills,” and the scene changes to the typically harsh red and glitter ball of a night at the dive. Eitzel’s subject is seen still playing air guitar, but it’s all in desperation. “And in this place,” he sings, “You can’t find a face without a trace of despair or a shroud.” Little has changed for American Music Club over the years — they’re one of our steadiest bands, and Eitzel’s tales of what happens in the dark are as insightful and perceptive as Greg Dulli’s. But there is one difference that’s palpable on the Golden Age, as “Little Pills” illustrates: we all get old, and the benefit of experience is that you write about the transformation, however tough it is to hear. — Johnny Loftus
[tags]American Music Club, The Golden Age, Matador, Mark Eitzel, Blue and Grey Shirt, Everclear, Mercury[/tags]
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