As the vocalist and main songwriter for American Music Club, Mark Eitzel was responsible for some of the most grainy and beautiful alt country epics of the 80’s. It’s a surprise then, to se another side of this artist revealed on ‘Candy Ass’, an album that flows from acoustic ballads to the type of ambient electronica more akin to Fourtet and Aphex Twin than the AMC.
It begins with ‘My Pet Rat St. Michael’, a darkly humorous ballad on picked guitar, and from there the album slips its moorings and drifts towards more abstract shores. ‘Cotton Candy Tenth Power’ recalls the Beta Band with its start-stop sampled rhythms and shimmering synth washes – music to watch solar eclipses to.
The third track ‘Make Sure They Hear’ is in a similar vein but there is an extra pop sheen to this, and with Eitzel’s dreamy vocals added, it has a kind of grandeur – the allure of city lights glimpsed through rain, that – startingly – makes me think of The Blue Nile and even Prefab Sprout at their moodiest. That’s a huge leap to make in three songs, but Eitzel pulls it off. ‘Sleeping Beauty’, a current live favourite, pulls all the different strands together for a moment in a beautiful love song. ‘A Loving Tribute To My City’ sidesteps back into the angular soundscapes that make up most of the rest of the album. On tracks such as ‘Roll Away My Stone’ and ‘I Am Fassbinder’, Eitzel’s voice rises from the mix like a ghost. ‘Green Eyes’ has echoes of Tom Waits, not just in the throaty vocals and the street poetry of the lyrics but in the way that the beat drags itself through the dirt while vibraphones and accordions spill over like a fairground in the distance:
“Sometimes hunger is a law that cancels every other law….Her eyes were green, much greener than all the cash she stole.”
By the final track ‘Guitar Lover’, the album has become a sprawl of abstract slivers of sound.
‘Candy Ass’ has a confusing but impressive span, from verse-verse-choruses through to a pool of synth squelches, almost as if the album is melting as it plays. Fortunately, listeners’ defences are bound to melt, too. A moody, offbeat gem.