Album Review: Mark Eitzel - 60 Watt Silver Lining

Mark Eitzel released his first post-American Music Club album in 1996.  It was quite jarring upon first listen with a smooth, jazzy sound involving copious brass.  Typically, despite being one of the foremost songwriters of his generation, he chose to open with his version of Goffin & King's torch-song No Easy Way Down.  He pulls it off, but then follows up with some pleasant but unremarkable tracks, the smooth shuffle of Sacred Heart, and the soulful Always Turn Away.  Later, Aspirin transcends these arrangements via the steel guitar of Bruce Kaphan.

A handful of torch-jazz songs make the cut.  Utilising Mark Isham on horns, Saved and Mission Rock Resort work quite well as vehicles for Eitzel's passionate vocals.  Some Bartenders Have The Gift of Pardon is a kind of weary, "last orders" version of this, featuring a fine turn on piano from Kaphan.

Cleopatra Jones and Southend On Sea are funky jazz experiments that don't work at all.  But for those looking for classic Eitzel, he does deliver.  When My Plane Finally Goes Down is a shimmering, drawn out ballad with goose-bump inducing chilly keyboards blowing through it.  Wild Sea is a largely acoustic track that functions like an update of Johnny Mathis' Feet, bearing a fine, desperate vocal.  Bleakness closes in on final track Everything Is Beautiful as Eitzel sings "the thinnest rope won't hang you" over descending piano and a sensitive accompaniment from the rest of the band.  

So a departure for Eitzel, the introduction of Eitzel as doomed torch singer.  And, though uneven, it works.

Album Review: Dakota Suite – This River Only Brings Poison

I’ve started typing a review of this 2003 album several times, and then scrapping it. It’s an album I’m finding very difficult to write coherently about. Which is not to say I don’t like it. It’s probably Dakota Suite’s most complete work, certainly in the conventional ‘rock’ music setting anyway.

Mainman Chris Hooson travelled to San Francisco for a portion of this album, recording with Bruce Kaphan (pedal steel) and Tim Mooney (drums) of American Music Club ‘fame’. There is prominent pedal steel on several of these tracks. The album opens with The Lepers Companion, which features the aforementioned instrument over a slow tempo and Hooson’s languid vocals, setting the template for what is to follow. Boats in a Sunken Ocean is driven by horns and features some prettily strummed guitar.

Most of the instrumentation on the album is quite subtle. Guitars are plucked rather than played, with touches of piano, steel guitar here and there as adornments, as opposed to fighting for dominance. Let’s Share Wounds is one of the busier songs, with electric guitar and harmonium, and there are couple of great duets featuring the vocals of Laura Donohue (Sand Fools The Shoreline, How Safe We Must Seem). The second of these is particularly strong, acoustic guitar overlaid with Kaphan’s soaring steel guitar.

The album is also notable for some palate-cleansing instrumentals (Finished River, Verdriet, Matching Eyes and Hands) usually featuring piano, and occasional strings, harmonium etc.

The Ferris Wheels of Winter is one of the longer tracks at seven and a half minutes. It sounds like sunset, with piano and guitar ‘hammer-ons’ to the fore, before glorious mariachi-style horns come in for the chorus. It continues in this vein till just before the end where we get a great coda of David Buxton and Hooson’s intertwining guitarpicking.

It’s the perfect album for a lazy summer afternoon.

Ideal circumstances to listen: Around 3.30pm on a warm yet overcast Monday afternoon in August, when you’re supposed to be somewhere else but in fact you’re having a peaceful afternoon at home.

Album Review: American Music Club - San Francisco

After the dispiriting experience (for the band at least) of Mercury, American Music Club went another direction for 1994’s San Francisco. Which is not to say it’s a mainstream album. Indeed as an album of 15 tracks, many of which are quite disparate, it’s nothing short of sprawling.

Fearless, the opening track, kicks off with Bruce Kaphan’s steel guitar prominent in the mix before Mark Eitzel’s moody vocals come in, singing “lost again…” in a lovelorn lament. It’s a lovely sounding song, though for my money the lyrics on this are a little obvious. In fact the lyrics on this album in my opinion are a little disappointing when compared with previous albums.

It’s Your Birthday appears to be a response to touring with Pearl Jam and the prevailing grunge sound of the time as it is a kind of self-consciously aggressive sounding song, while Can You Help Me? is a more pleasant sounding song. It sounds quite commercial, but it’s actually a really good song, with a ‘proper’ verse and chorus. It should have been a hit, but perhaps Eitzel and co weren’t wearing the right plaid shirts and goatees.

Love Doesn’t Belong to Anyone is another track featuring prominent steel guitar, and again it’s quite pretty, with delicate picked guitar. It does not, however, feel important, in the same way that some of their previous work does. After the fairly ordinary Wish the World Away we get a kind of left turn with the classicly titled How Many Six Packs Does It Take To Screw in a Light, which is a sort of quirky kind of song. Cape Canaveral which follows is a lot more downbeat as the bands instruments coalesce into a magnificently gloomy murk.

After Hello Amsterdam which is the requisite AMC ‘clunker’ on this album, the rest of the album features a great streak of really strong songs, musically in any case. The Revolving Door has a soaring melody and a great vocal performance from Mark Eitzel, The band sound quite polished on this one, whereas next track In The Shadow of the Valley is another slab of magnificently brooding, gloomy murk in the vein of Cape Canaveral.

What Holds The World Together is an acoustic led, almost torch song, slightly reminiscent of the Smiths but featuring a gloriously big chorus where Eitzel sings that “the world is held together by the wind that blows through Gena Rowlands’ hair.” Clearly. I Broke My Promise is another quite polished track which references muse Kathleen Burns. The Smiths are invoked again on sparse acoustic track The Thorn In My Side Is Gone, and I’ll Be Gone is a pleasing slab of melodrama.

It’s a curious collection which features some very strong songs, but not sure it ‘holds together’ that well as an album. There are a few mediocre moments, a bit like these blogposts.

Album Review: American Music Club – Mercury

When Mark Eitzel and co finally started to get some plaudits (for 1991’s Everclear), a major label deal and a relatively large recording budget, they reacted in the only way they knew how. They enlisted producer Mitchell Froom to make a somewhat difficult album which bore little resemblance in sound to their previous output!

I prefer to call it a subtle album. Those who fell in love with pedal steel guitar player Bruce Kaphan’s contributions to Everclear would be disappointed here, as he is limited to minimal embellishments here and there.

Gratitude Walks is a classic Eitzel song, opening with piano and some steel guitar, before Eitzel croons lyrical gems like “chains on the oasis that leads a man to drink, drunk on the kind of applause that gets louder the lower you sink.” It’s a classic alcoholic insight that needs no explanation. If I Had A Hammer is probably one of the more conventional songs here, again leading off with piano and same great guitar touches. It’s all going along quite nicely till they throw in a weird bleepy bit in the middle, before Eitzel continues on the theme of the last song, singing “I don’t know if I’ve reached the bottom yet… I feel time pass like a joy I tried so hard to relearn, but somewhere along the line I passed the point of no return.”

Challenger is a total change of pace, with Vudi’s raging, murky guitars before we’re back in familiar territory with I’ve Been A Mess. This song is almost self-parody with Eitzel self-flagellating (“I’ve been a mess since you’ve been gone”) over prominent steel guitar. One of my kids said to me once that it sounds just like me singing on guitar!

Most of the rest of songs are reasonably subtle, albeit many of them with lengthy titles (What Godzilla Said to God When His Name Wasn’t Found In The Book Of Life, The Hopes and Dreams of Heaven’s 10,000 Whores), which often bear little relation to the songs themselves. Self-sabotage? If so it’s a thoroughly enjoyable one.

The album is also notable for the presence of Johnny Mathis’ Feet, which is to non-AMC fans, probably the song they are best remembered for. It’s a classic contradiction that it is in fact a fairly atypical song for them, musically at least. It’s pretty much a big ballad, with Eitzel bellowing out a tale of comparing his songs unfavourably with Johnny Mathis, over a big ‘kitchen sink’ style production number which throws in strings, steel guitar and dramatic crescendos.

One of the stranger tracks is the second last one, More Hopes and Dreams, which is a bit of self-indulgence from the band where they recorded sounds from an electrical power station which sounded perfect for the album! The final track, Will You Find Me, is an AMC acoustic-based closer in the vein of Last Harbour from California. It’s downright lovely, with a fragile acoustic guitar riff, sensitive vocals from Eitzel sounding almost at breaking point, and some keyboards which work really well. The middle section with an acoustic guitar solo backed by unconventional guitar work from Kaphan demands to be heard. It’s almost impossibly beautiful, and gives the lie to those who dismiss steel guitar as clichéd country nonsense.

Predictably this sort of stuff did not sell in grunge-era 1993, and from then on American Music Club were doomed to obscurity.

Album Review: American Music Club – Everclear

Apologies for another AMC post, this blog is rapidly turning into the AMC/Smog related blog! This album represented a bit of a change for American Music Club. Released in 1991, it saw them working with a half decent recording budget, which led to a fuller sound. Bruce Kaphan was now a full member of the band, and he pitched in on production, as well as steel guitar duties. Nothing of the subtlety of this band was lost with this change. It’s compounded by the vivid artwork on the cover, a painting by Jean Lowe.

The album starts with Why Won’t You Stay, a lament for a departed lover which drifts in unassumingly, with some heartbreaking lyrics from Mark Eitzel (“in memory of a little girl who was far too much in love with the world, and who didn’t wanna stick around for the end”). Rise follows, which is a bit more of a self-conscious anthem, with a very definite chorus (the fairly un- Eitzel “make it ri-i-ise”). It’s a good song, though it sounds a little dated.

The understated anthem to apathy, Miracle on 8th Street, follows, drifting along in a similar vein to the opener, but Ex-Girlfriend is less oblique, with a hard-hitting, insistent melody and fairly direct lyrics (“day to day life shouldn’t be what it’s all about”… “I guess you got no one to take care of you”) over some great guitar-hero style playing from Vudi.

The usual AMC curveball follows, Crabwalk, a cheesy country song which totally disturbs the mood, until it’s reined back in by the almost smooth The Confidential Agent, which floats along in a similar vein to Miracle, aided and abetted by the subtle steel guitar playing of Bruce Kaphan and some nice keyboards.

The album seems a little smooth up to now, but Sick of Food is angrier, with more great guitar from Vudi, and Eitzel displaying great passion towards the end. He’s angrier still on The Dead Part of You with the refrain “there’s so little of you left”. Royal Café is a gentle country-rock song and it’s followed by the beautiful What the Pillar of Salt Held Up, another sad(ish) song based around a fragile acoustic guitar.

The album resolves wonderfully with final track Jesus’ Hands. It’s basically a drinking song, Eitzel singing “I got a thirst that would make the ocean proud”. There is some really nice mandolin on this one, played by Dan Pearson.