American Music Club - The Golden Age

Now consisting only of two original members, Mark Eitzel and guitarist Vudi, the second album into American Music Club’s reformation finds them revisiting the more introspective moments of their past and they admirably succeed on The Golden Age.
This is an important rediscovery, particularly considering that I had pretty much written off Eitzel thanks to some fairly unremarkable solo efforts and that ambivalence carried over into 2004’s proper A.M.C. reunion, Love Songs For Patriots.
I almost let The Golden Age go too and, to be honest, my first spin of it was marred with too many distractions for it to fully take hold. So be careful: it’s subtle enough to discount and the allure is within that understatement. Eitzel and Vudi fall in together like a pair of well-worn jeans, and the moment you notice agreeable their arrangement is the moment you begin to appreciate that they’re still making music together. It just may take a few spins to come to that conclusion.
This does point to idea that it is this duo, Eitzel and Vudi, who are entitled to the A.M.C. moniker. They may have come to the realization that neither one may be able to achieve their best without the aid of the other and that moment of resignation may be The Golden Age’s laid-back core.
It’s then up to Eitzel to step up on the notion that he’s one of America’s premier songwriters and that designation is only really apparent when he maintains that down-and-out, barfly gutter-poet. Thankfully, he sticks to that formula here rather than overreaching on topics beyond the range of his weary baritone. The Golden Age is littered with dismal character studies of broads, booze and bullshitters.
Someone once called American Music Club this country’s answer to Joy Division. Thankfully, Eitzel’s too busy down at the bar taking notes to stay at home and watch Werner Herzog films. Just make sure you’re not too engaged to overlook how good it is to have A.M.C. back and firing on their two remaining cylinders.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise

American Music Club - California

While working as a Music Director for the student radio station, I fielded weekly calls from record companies trying to push their products onto our playlist. Most of them were cool and a few were cooler than others were. One of the coolest was a person named Jay.
Jay worked at Frontier records, an independent label out of San Francisco best known for releasing Suicidal Tendencies’ first album. It sold enough to fund their operations for a few years and, along the way, signing a few good acts that were totally different from the label’s main source of income. Jay turned me on to a good Thin White Rope album (one that I am still looking for today, In The Spanish Cave) and I can never thank him enough for encouraging me to listen to American Music Club’s third album, California.
A lot of people are going to claim that they new American Music Club during their early days, but allow me to call bullshit on that. Nobody heard of American Music Club in the late 80’s, me included. In fact, if Jay had not been doing his job, I would have overlooked California, and from what I remember, there were a lot of college stations across the country that ignored Jay and did not bother to take it out of the shrink-wrap.
That’s a shame because almost instantaneously I could recognize that leader Mark Eitzel was doing something special with his words. Musically, it didn’t fit with anything being released in 1988, which may have contributed to the album’s ultimate demise. Pedal steels, acoustic guitars, and a gentle restraint abound throughout the record, which made it an anomaly among its peers.
All of this lends perfectly to one of the country’s best and overlooked songwriters. Eitzel’s light shines brightly here, perhaps never to be matched again, with “Somewhere,” “Lonely,” and “Blue And Grey Shirt” being the three cuts that we whittled down from the album and placed on the station’s playlist.
“Blue And Grey Shirt” was an unusual choice, but it’s the best song on the album. Eitzel sings of a friend’s final days after suffering from AIDS. Brilliantly subtle, the line “Where’s the compassion/To make your tired heart sing/’Cause I’m tired of being a spokesman/For every tired thing” speaks volume at the lack of empathy that the Reagan administration seemed to demonstrate towards the victims of this unfortunate disease.
Most of the songs on California fall into a category of slow to medium tempo, brooding folk-country, “Bad Liquor” breaks that mold and fails miserably. At less than two minutes, “Bad Liquor” sounds like a shitty song from a farm-league Replacements band, drunkenly barked through a megaphone and destroying the mood that California would have perfectly created otherwise. For whatever reason, Frontier records stupidly chose to promote this particular cut, sending radio stations with a pint of shitty peach schnapps with an American Music Club’s “Bad Liquor” label placed strategically over the original one on the bottle. Clever idea, I suppose, but this was not the track to be focusing on.
Aside from that awful detour, the rest of California is a haunting and overlooked gem that was quietly released to little fanfare. And if not for the dutiful efforts of one underpaid employee at the band’s record company, I would have completely missed it too.