| From Elvis to Axl, rock singers have been living up to the Dionysian ideal: sexual, untamed, vaguely threatening. So where do Pere Ubu's David Thomas and American Music Club's Mark Eitzel fit in? They don't and that's precicely why they matter. As Pere Ubu performed at Metro and American Music Club at Lounge Ax over the weekend, Thomas and Eitzel were once again standing rock tradition on it's head, shaking out the loose change. Thomas once dubbed himself Crocus Behemoth, and standing over 6 feet with the girth of a sumo wrestler, he is a truly likely frontman. Rather than cover up his sense of displacement, however,Thomas revels in it. By turns comical and poignant, he paces the stage like a man agonised by indecision, fluttering his hands, rolling his eyes, pounding his chest. Thomas' songs dwell on the misfit nature of love."The next portion of the show is called, 'How do men and women ever get along?'" he announced at one point. In the past, Thomas' lyrics had a more whimsical, even absurdist bent, and they were matched by the synthesizer beeps and burps of Allen Ravenstine. But now Ravenstine is gone, and the music has lost some of it's other- worldly mystery. In its place has come a power that envokes the John Cale-era Velvet Underground, with Garo Yellin's cello and Jim Jones' guitar erupting into droning jams over Scott Krauss' enplacably brilliant drumming. In this new enviroment, Thomas' worldplay has taken on a bittersweet poetry. "Where do the brokenhearted park their cars?" he lamented. Like Van Morrison, Thomas does not suffer imperfection silently, and his complaining about an unruly amplifier - "This is so dissatisfying"- kept things tense on stage.I t made for a less than fully satisfying performance. Thomas did his best to remain professional, but he and the band never rose to the transcendent heights of past Chicago shows. American Music Club did, however,perhaps because Eitzel's self absorption no longer seemed so maudlin.In the past, the singers more overwrought performances have made Neil Diamond in his "I am I said" phase sound positively understated. His songs dwell on ineptitude and wretchedness, usually in combination with some form of brain-numbing beverage (hence the title "Everclear" for one of American Music Club's albums). So "Outside This Bar" was the perfect song with which to open."Outside this bar,tell me, does anyone survive?" Eitzel crooned. In the baritone range, Eitzels' voice is fairly sure of itself, but he freqently pushes it well beyond it's capacity to reach a high note or to sustain a phrase. But Eitzel didn't sound pathetic so much as desperate, mostly because his band was with him at every turn. At times, AMC resembles a jazz combo,with their affinty for gauzy atmosphere and pointillistic dabs of colour. But when needed, guitarist Vudi can turn up the burners, which was especially satisfying on "Challenger" and "Johnny Mathis' Feet" and when Eitzel's grand agony threatened to become too much, the band pumelled AC/DC's "Highway to hell". Review by Greg Kot for Chicago Tribune 7th June 1993 Return to homepage here |
| American Music Club Lounge Ax,Chicago,IL June 4th 1993 |