| A lot of bellowing went on at American Music Club's show on Tuesday night.The groups lead singer,Mark Eitzel, moos and emotes and howls,a cross between a lounge singer and a walrus,His songs,usually about loss and longing and lonliness,are built for his baritone huffing,and his melodies wander,only to suddenly turn up at a repeated phrase.It's all meant to imply sentiment,and it does. Mr Eitzel is among rock's most excruciatingly open songwriters and if it weren't for his funny,self-depreciating patter between songs,he'd be almost unbearable,some weird sort of artless emotional pontificator.But the in- between-song spiels make him a real person.and his confessions end up seeming like a kind of heroism; he throws out what he feels,without worrying whether it's foolish or not. He's a particularly clumsy writer as well,a Whitmanesque cross between admirable self-confession and totally unendurable verbal and emotional obviousness.On one song he sang,"Some of them smile and it's phony/some of them smile and it's not" and on an older song,'Western Sky,' he exaled the line,"the charade has passed us by," a line worthy of the dumbest pre-rock pop. The band produced some beautiful musical backdrops for Mr Eitzel's wailing,spreading fogs of sound around the hall,or resorting to a kind of rock and folk minimilism.At times,because the band uses such unusual harmonies, it veered toward being a post-punk version of Joni Mitchell; at others,spewing sound all around,it acheived an oceanic intensity that became all-embracing. Reviewed for The New York Times May 27th 1993 Return To homepage here |
| American Music Club Irving Plaza May 25th 1993 |