So, let's get really fed-up and dig hours and hours and hours of the American Music Club. I should take this opportunity to apologise to EP Garside, because I can clearly remember many, many years ago, him trying to convince me of the merits of United Kingdom and my response was to be very strident in my opinion that it wasn't up to much. I was way wrong. Anyway, after The Restless Stranger yesterday we move up a notch (and down a mood) with 1987's Engine. This is often regarded as another relatively weak entry in the AMC canon but to be honest I absolutely adore it. It appeals so much to the deeply misanthropic misery that I truly am. It's like a soundtrack to a screening of the inside of a despairing and brutally disgusted mind. I feel right at home listening to it. It's still got that late rock, new wavey feel to it, but it's much denser, much heavier than the Restless Stranger and lyrically Eitzel is beginning to strip away the storytelling and to concentrate more on creating mood, and this is a seriously bleak mood. It's great. Next up is California (1988) which starts with a misleadingly upbeat countryish tune, complete with jaunty pedal steel and strangely romantic lyrics. Never fear, we're going down from there with a succession of variously taut and anguished songs, but unlike the two previous albums it is occasionally leavened with some lighter moments. California sets the stall out in many ways for AMC's increasingly eclectic stylistic approach, taking in country, folk, heavy rock, and most things in between, but crucially, the record never sounds like a compilation of stuff, somehow managing to maintain a sense of a unified whole. Unlike the follow-up United Kingdom (1989) which actually is an assortment of scraps and live songs. Quite remarkably though, United Kingdom still works as an album, partly because the whole thing is bleaker than a weekend watching Bergman movies. It is utterly hopeless, scarcely a chink of light is allowed into these tales of failure and unnoticed tragedy but listening to United Kingdom is a challenging and extremely rewarding exercise.
One of the problems with the early AMC albums is that they're all so grim that you can't help feeling that Eitzel takes himself way too seriously. The couple of years off that he took from the band helped to refocus his songwriting and in 1991's Everclear, he finally introduced a clearly ironic tone, and although the record is still a mixed bag of styles, it is a very tightly defined and structured record which, for the first time, sounds like a truly superb album start to finish. On top of which, Eitzel has managed to change his tone lyrically on occasion from crushingly mordant to genuinely heartbreaking. For the most part it's still dismal tales of friends' Aids-related deaths and heroin addictions and alcoholism, but when he takes a step back from the abyss, there is finally some gallows humour and the songs (and the listener) are allowed some space to breathe. For the first time also AMC released an EP in support of the album. The lead song 'Rise' was a deliberately obtuse choice from the album I think, but the EP contains one of Eitzel's greatest songs in 'Chanel No. 5'.
The general consensus seems to be that Everclear was the pinnacle of Eitzel's work, but for my money the best came next with 1993's Mercury, a sprawling, expansive journey through the various miseries of Eitzel's seemingly battered psyche. The songwriting really hits a peak on Mercury with some complex and unexpected arrangements, together with some wilfully self-destructive touches (this being the first album for a major label), and the ironic humour stands out more clearly than ever (single 'Johnny Mathis' Feet' is a grandstanding case in point). It seems that Eitzel was keen that an audience should know that he was well aware of how over-the-top some of his excesses of despair were, but that doesn't impinge on his heightened writing and some of the songs here ('The Hopes and Dreams of Heaven's 10,000 Whores', 'Apology for an Accident') are quite staggering. The album was preceded by two versions of the 'Johnny Mathis' Feet' single, each of which contained some demo versions of album tunes, and followed by the 'Keep Me Around' single which has one of the loveliest, and simplest, songs they ever recorded in 'Memo from Aquatic Park'.
From these heights the only way is down and unfortunately 1994's San Francisco doesn't match up and shows signs of the internal friction that was causing trouble in the band. The album could have done with some pruning and despite containing some fabulous songs ('Love Doesn't Belong to Anyone', 'I Broke My Promise'), it feels lucklustre and unfocussed, lurching from lovelorn balladry to furious amped-up rock in a heartbeat, all the while sounding tired and careworn. It's still a great album, but it feels a long way from Engine and you sense that if the band carried on down this path the songs would just start to fade into the air. Again, the album was bookended by singles, in this case a two-version 'Wish the World Away' which is a fairly brutal rock number with some demos and a couple of decent new songs backing it, and 'Can You Help Me', which is a pretty downbeat song, which ends with an uninspired cover of 'California Dreaming'. It's not a fitting end to the career of one of the most intriguing and vital bands of the 80's and 90's. I guess they didn't think so either because 10 years later they were back for another round, which we'll look at, er, listen to, tomorrow.
See you chaps.
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