American Music Club Spaceland,Los Angeles,CA 15/12/03 In the early and mid-'90s, American Music Club's singer-songwriter-leader Mark Eitzel seemed perpetually at odds with the world, a woozy, irascible presence ready to pick a fight with either his audience or band. News of an AMC reunion, therefore, had all the credence of a barroom rumor, a slurred secret retailed by the drunk at the next barstool. But on the third of four Mondays they're playing this month, there was Eitzel fronting the reformed American Music Club in an erratic but satisfying short set. The free shows give the band a chance to test-drive material from their next album, tentatively titled "You Better Watch What You Say," before a live aud. As the title suggests, Eitzel is in a political mood these days, but not at the expense of his usual romance through a shot glass prism. "Patriot Heart," the best of the new material, (and possibly one of the best songs written this year, period), is an angry, somewhat perverse beauty of a song that combines the political and the romantic. The song's narrator sits in a male strip club lusting after a dancer in a red, white and blue Speedo, the scene's casual corruption seeping into the imagery, ending with the singer decrying the "desert whorehouse" the world has become. "Team USA" is a less successful political foray, a crunching punk riff that's undercut by lyrical cliches. "1,000 Miles" is Eitzel's version of a road song, where Jesus is encountered at a rest stop, and advises the singer to "never give them anything they can turn into a lie." Musically, the tunes still feel like works in progress; guitar and keyboard parts are not fully worked out. But the band plays well together, and Eitzel was in a good mood, one that not even a series of broken strings and guitars that refused to remain in tune could darken. Local group Bedroom Walls preceded AMC with an artfully quiescent set. Songs such as "Winter, That's All" (from their Giant Pets debut "I Saw You Coming Back to Me") feel like domestic squabbles turned into songs -- repeated lines turn more ardent, then retreat, until the tensions explode in guitar and violin squalls, reminiscent at times of the Pixies and in Adam Goldman's monotone vocals, Luna. Producer Daniel Lanois opened the evening with some intriguing atmospherics. Sitting at a pedal steel guitar, he shaped the notes into billowing echoed chords that twined and hung like mists on a swamp. Picking up an electric guitar, the sounds took on an Arcadian accent. As the lyrics bayed at the moon, looking for some higher ground, his gnarled guitar solos overtook them like floodwaters breaching a levee. Reviewd by Steven Mirkin for Variety Return to homepage here |