On the Music Club’s last album, the tattered and weary blues of ‘Love Songs For Patriots’ was offset with tunes that there scathing, wistful and confiding. It was dreamy and dislocated, barbed and bleeding. It tore into the Bush administration with literary abandon and did such equal measures of healing and violence to your heart you might have mistaken Eitzel for a surgeon.
So what’s changed?
Not a great deal – although the hellfire and the fury are largely absent, making way for a cruising-speed selection of murmuring, sepia toned, down beat poetics vaguely reminiscent of early 1970s AOR combos like Bread, Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles. ‘All My Love’ – all tricking guitar arpeggios, snare brushes and breathy, widescreen vocals creates an almost sub-zero gravity only occasionally relieved with the occasional boozy barroom waltz (‘I Know That’s Not Really You’) and the more frisky moon-thrills of tracks like ‘The Decibels and The Little Pills’ breaking into 2nd gear. If you were to be churlish and unappreciative of Eitzel’s statesman-like grasp of American poetics and his casual, understated intellect you might describe it as a rather unremarkable album marred by the same lilting, pace, the same quiet menace and roughly the same keys and chords. But that would be to ignore the reckless inoffensiveness of tracks like ‘All The Lost Souls Welcome You To San Francisco’ (a somnambulist’s ‘New York, New York’ if you will – and quite beautiful) and the bloody marvellous ‘Windows Of The World’ an ode not only to the World Trade Centre but to the downtown lows that bond the bar community.
Recorded at King Size Studios in Los Angeles, home of producer/mixer Dave Triumfio of Wilco, Grandaddy and My Morning Jacket, American Music Club’s ‘The Golden Age’ is more than ably manned by mainstay and lead guitarist, Vudi, Jason Borger, Sean Hoffman and Steve Didelot of The Larks.
Bit like spending a lazy afternoon in Irish bar early Sunday morning.