American Music Club - California
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CD Details
Artist: American Music ClubEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1993-09-06
Music Label: Frontier Records
Music reviews of California
Music Review: Exquisite sounds & poetics
Rating: 5 Stars
Mark Eitzel has an outstanding combination of talents: an expressive voice, the gift of tunes & arrangements plus a poetic writing style that admittedly veers at times towards the desperate and the hopeless as in alcoholic despair. His use of understatement often intensifies the emotional impact. Loss, despair and rejection may be familiar themes but the effect is often uplifting because of the sheer exquisite beauty of the songs.
Kicking off with the melancholy & delicately tuned Firefly with unforgettable poetic lines like: "Are you waiting for loneliness to paralyze, are you waiting for Sister Midnight to anaesthetize?" the sequence of gems continues with the grittier rock of Somewhere that even contains some wry humor. Pale Skinny Girl and Laughingstock are similar in style; the second shifts tempo between slow, half-spoken segments to sung parts and guitar sections. The vocals on Pale Skinny Girl vary from a whisper to a soar and the guitar from sensitive to a roar.
Another favorite of mine which is on a par with Firefly is the majestic Lonely, a song with a killer melody, aching words and penetrating imagery. The poignant and sensitive Blue & Grey Shirt is in my opinion the third entrancing masterpiece on California but the next track Bad Liquor rudely rips the listener out of the trance, being a harsh, up-tempo rock number. Another track with searing guitar is Highway, a slice of shimmering rock. There is much heartbreak in Now You're Defeated, a complex number with delicate guitar parts and plenty of vocal variation.
Of course the sound is unique but certain songs or feelings do call to mind other artists. Firefly and Lonely for example, remind me of Nick Drake. The exquisite melodies and elegant arrangements bring to mind Sufjan Stevens on a song like Sister from the Seven Swans album. The obsession with Demon Drink is shared by another master of melancholia, ex-Swans leader Michael Gira who is now with Angels of Light. It's difficult to decide which of California or Everclear is my favorite AMC album.
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