Mark Eitzel isn’t an especially physically impressive guy. His dress code is pretty strictly San Francisco jazz-dude dapper casual, he’s losing his hair (the hardy remnants are usually hidden beneath an old-guy hat) and he proudly rocks the strongest unibrow in rock and roll. But the man writes complex, dazzlingly literary songs, and he pairs that skill with the biggest, warmest, most versatile and most unmistakable singing voice I’ve ever heard. After a decade of solo work – some of which, like 1998’s Caught In A Trap, is quite good – he’s back with American Music Club. Love Songs For Patriots, their first record in a decade, is more than any AMC fan could’ve hoped for: the razor edge of Eitzel’s best solo lyricism is back, and paired with a band that knows how to build around his lyrical runs. The AMC lineup is the only band that has ever made Eitzel’s songs sound complete, and his solo work has sharpened his songwriting considerably. I could go on about how awesome all this collaboration and virtuosity is, but I’ll just say this instead: Love Songs For Patriots is one of the best albums of 2004.
A large part of why – at least as large a part as how tight a band AMC is, and how richly talented Eitzel is – is the fact that Love Songs is very much a record of 2004. The album was released several weeks before the recent presidential election – which I am contractually required to mention in every single review I write – and while its darker songs now sound sadly prescient, the whole album, happy and sad, is shot through with the anxiety of this bizarre, slowly tightening garrote of a year. Which, I know, makes the record sound like an old-fashioned good time; it’s not quite that dark. Eitzel is a devastatingly mordant observer, and can be quite funny at times. He underplays it on “Myopic Books,” which is a wry, dreamlike look at loneliness and relationships that starts with Eitzel wandering from his apartment in search of a bookstore where “the music they play there/will be Dinosaur Jr./and the people who works there/will be super-skinny/and super-unfriendly/and that would make me happy.” He goes for the gusto more on “The Horseshoe Wreath In Bloom,” which smirkingly amps up a winning-the-lottery fantasy to a manic climax involving “Ed McMahon and all his gorgeous models.” It’s got a little of that condescending-to-the-rubes thing, but Eitzel’s vision of bugged-out materialistic optimism is recognizable, and recognizably worthy of condescencion. Even when he’s bad, he’s good.
The rest of AMC does fantastic work on “Horseshoe Wreath,” working their way into a frothing jazz funeral of a breakdown, and the presence of the ensemble helps put meat on Eitzel’s lyrics throughout Love Songs. Some of the quieter, sparer songs work as urgent, intimate Eitzel solo ventures – “Myopic Books” is like that, and the band’s presence on songs like “Mantovani the Mind Reader” is all ambient percussion and piano. And at times, Love Songs just shows the old AMC formula back in action: fans will love “Love Is” and the honestly romantic “Only Love Can Set You Free,” but both songs sound like outtakes from AMC albums like Mercury or Everclear. Those who have heard those records know that’s a high compliment indeed, but Love Songs is at its best when AMC does new things with their old stylings.
The ringing “Home” and the album-opening rallying cry “Ladies and Gentlemen” are boosted immeasurably by Vudi’s ringing guitar lines and Tim Mooney’s expressive drumming. And when everything clicks, the results are truly dizzying: on songs like the wild, passionate “Patriot’s Heart” and the more understated but equally heartfelt “The Devil Needs You,” American Music Club are absolutely as good as they’ve ever been. “Patriot’s Heart” is both a gut-wrenchingly straightforward look at a desperate male stripper and his clients and a subtle look at how close the freedom of exploitation is to the center of American culture’s other, more lionized freedoms. “The Devil Needs You” is just as good: a whispery Eitzel vocal addresses myopic red-state bigotry with devastating economy – “you want to show me heaven/you assume that’s what I’ve lost/you’ll go home and sing hymns with your wife/I’ll stay here and carry your cross” – before the song wanders into a murk of funereal horns and washed-out, rumbling percussion. It’s a forlorn, uncertain ending for this album, but not at all an inappropriate one.
There’s more to political music, and political awareness, than Vote Or Die stridency. The reason I keep bringing this year’s political and cultural context into my reviews is, simply, because I think it belongs there. (It’s also a kind of postmodern wimp-out: my way of reminding you that it’s just me talking about these records, and how they sound to me, where I am) Clearly, titling an album Love Songs For Patriots in an especially tempestuous election year invites reading the record in a broader context. But there’s not a lot of stridency here, although Eitzel, as a gay, hard-drinking ex-punker could certainly dial that knob up to 11 if he so chose. Instead, there’s a collection of songs both wistful and rageful, understated and stompingly authoritative, songs (sorry, Leonard) of love and hate. It’s just an album, but an album made with an eye on what goes on both outside the studio and inside the heads of Americans who care. The lyrics and the music are very good, almost without exception; it’s what’s around and under them that makes Love Songs For Patriots great. |