Iron Horse,Northampton,MA May 23rd 1993
"I'll be back. I went to get a beer," came the answer from bass player Danny Pearson at the Iron Horse Music Hall bar.
Half-serious, half-macabre, San Francisco's American Music Club played a sometime-riveting, sometime-wandering set Sunday night for a half-empty audience, most of whom seemed familiar with Eitzel's "mope-rock" songs.
Darlings of the critics, AMC has yet to break through, although the quintet is getting a push by Reprise Records on a tour to promote "Mercury," a new, 14-song disc produced by Mitchell Froom, whose credits include Los Lobos and Richard Thompson.
Eitzel, a balding Army brat who grew up in Taiwan and Southampton, England, when punk was in vogue, writes morose songs with few hints of standard melodic structure.
Although many of the tunes just barely miss, there's a soaring quality in the quintet's live performance that draws you in. It helps that none of the songs go on for too long.
"Johnny Mathis' Feet" was a center-piece, of sorts.
"Johnny looked at my songs, and he said, 'My first guess,
" 'Never in my life have I seen such a mess.' "
Another line went: "Why do you sing everything as if you were a thief?"
At one point, Eitzel said: "We don't have any happy songs."
But he tries to make up for it with off-beat banter, including using a cheesy crystal ball with a disembodied voice answering such questions as: "Should we do another song?"
"Positively," comes the voice.
The rave-up, "Bad Liquor," from one of AMC's five independently-released albums, was called a Bachman-Turner Overdrive number, with tongue-in-cheek. It quoted Barbara Streisand: "People who need people are the luckiest people."
"Sick Of Food" featured the lines: "I'm sick of food. So why I am so hungry? I'm sick of feeling the world draw away from me."
If one song typified AMC's approach, it was Eitzel's "I've Been a Mess (Since You've Been Gone)," a dirge with such lyrics as: "You're going to turn me into a great American zombie. I'm so hungry for you."
Instrumentally, AMC's texture comes from pedal steel and keyboard player Bruce Kaphan, although Eitzel's rhythm guitar cuts a swath. Lead guitarist Vudi, whose trademark seems to be a foppish looking cowboy hat, emerges when the band does a wall of noise tune, the occasional nod to Seattle grunge rock.
"The Hopes and Dreams of Heaven's 10,000 Whores" was another of Eitzel's half-earnest compositions whose title promised more than it delivered.
Why aren't the lyrics printed in the CD booklet of "Mercury," if song craft is the point of AMC?
Review by Brad Smith for Springfield Union News May 25th 1993
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