| CAMBRIDGE--Modern rock fans may like to dance, but they've got nothing against sad songs with sweeping
melancholy.To wit, Roy Orbison, Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake have been godfathers of sorts to artists such as Joy Division, Cowboy Junkies, and Nick Cave. You can add American Music Club - terrible name, by the way, reminds you of the thoroughly anonymous American Standard Band - to the list of bands whose primary motif is sadness.Their main musical mode is intimate,countrified rock. The San Francisco based band have released five albums - and been praised to the heavens in England - but remain fairly obscure in the United States. The situation may be beginning to change somewhat with the release of their latest work, the well recieved "Everclear" on Alias.Strong press, good college airplay. But,in concert, how much flailing in pain can you take? Even if that pain is leavened by humor between songs. A sampling of lyrical thoughts from the mouth of AMC singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel during the bands 80 minute set at Nightstage Tuesday: "You can't overcome your bitterness and pain","All I'm good for is watching you sleep" "You're so pretty baby/Where did you go","....your look of disgust when I touched your skin....you try to put me in my place,but that seems a little weak, weak for my taste", "why do you hate me so bad?/I was the best friend you ever had...Oh God I hate you for telling me what's going to happen the rest of my life". Hey, folks, those are song snippets from just the first half of the set and while we can be fans of the angst-and- tortured school of songwriting - and, are of AMC in places, Eitzel gets to be a little too much. (His goatee doesn't help much - ever seen a goatee and not thought about pretentiousness?). The five piece band does sculpt a nice quiet storm of a sound: a lush, textural, almost Roxy Music-ish layering spiced with some delicious pedal steel guitar leads. Taken song by song AMC's sad magic hit a number of mini peaks - Rise was especially majestic - but over the course of a set a sense of over-familiarity settled in. You knew the game plan and you were just watching them play it out. One sharply detailed, country-rock song of betrayal or hurt or anger after another, followed by an Eitzel gesture like buying the guys at the front table a round or an admission like, "I talk too much between songs-I'm trying to be like Chris Isaak". It's not a bad thing American Music Club did, but what stirred you at the outset makes you restless by midset and bored by the end. Review by Jim Sullivan for Boston Globe 24th October 1991 Return to homepage here |
| American Music Club Nightstage,Cambridge,MA October 22nd 1991 |