Another week and another timely terrorist atrocity keeps Bush’s anti-terrorist, pro-oil spin turning wildly in his favour. It happened on September 11th 2001. It happened in Madrid in March 2004 – just as the anti-terror campaign itself was about to blow in the face of mounting evidence supporting prisoner abuse. We now know pretty much for certain that the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda’s plans on September 11th. We can pretty much guarantee that the CIA was responsible for lighting the touch-paper that ignited the anthrax scare too. Now we can go one step further: we can say with some certainty that someone, somewhere within this shadowy community is exerting some kind of control on how and when some of these events occur. According to a Newsweek poll released on Saturday President Bush emerged from the Republican National Convention with an 11-point lead over Democrat John Kerry. The fact that the Beslan atrocity occurred smack bang in the middle of this convention is no coincidence. The fact it was children this time that took the brunt of the impact again is no coincidence. What better fuel for the fire? Drastic results need drastic measures. On September 11th Bush sat motionless at the desks of children in a similar classroom at Booker Elementary School. What better backdrop for evil that the smiles of tender innocence? It’s the same cast, the same old story, only this time those tender smiling faces have been thrust into a disturbing central role in an increasingly desperate arrangement.
What’s all this got to do with the American Music Club and ‘Love Songs For Patriots’? Everything and everything. Club leader Mark Eitzel has rallied the band that brought us Mercury and Everclear to compact a thousand measures of grief in the soul of the patriot, using all his usual lyrical twists and characteristic brine to press it home:
“What kills your soul is the pain you make/ The fights you throw/ The love you fake“
Internal contradictions, ambivalent emotions – ‘Love Songs For Patriots’ is a bitter little reminder of all we’ve had to digest in recent years. It’s dark, it’s mournful and it’s steeped in muted, sombre pulses and all manner of peripheral, discordant noises (‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, ‘The Devil Needs You’) but it’s also supported by striking if fragile beauty (‘Another Morning’, ‘Love Is’). The band’s last album, 1994’s ‘San Francisco’ might have been a rough and uneven affair, but Love Songs connects the strands of a breaking heart with such constancy that its hurting literally bleeds from the speaker. ‘The Patriot’s Heart’ is in equal measures scathing, wistful and confiding, with the tattered, weary blues continuing through the sepia melancholy of ‘Mantovani The Mind Reader’ and the dreamy, dislocated magic of ‘The Devil Needs You’ and ‘Songs Of The Rat Leaving The Sinking Ship’. There are few surprises in the sinister, barbed metaphors but there are even fewer disappointments.
The booming kick-drums may be as unsettling as an avalanche of ashes or a pyroclastic surge but the sparkling guitars and prayerful organs provide a haven of tranquillity in a fury of chaos where the implausible is your only certainty.
So if you are still in any doubt about your civic duty, listen to this album and then your heart.
The truth is in there…