CAMBRIDGE -- Reunions are almost never a good idea. Whether it's the Sex Pistols or ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show," icons who once captured a cultural zeitgeist and meant something -- or still do, on disc, celluloid, or our collective consciousness -- can never equal, let alone surpass, what we remember them for, which is why they mattered in the first place.
Usually, when a once-important band reunites after an impossibly long layoff -- often for financial rather than artistic reasons -- the best we can do is wince and hope its members don't embarrass themselves or sully their legends too badly.
American Music Club, the San Francisco art-rock outfit whose epically melancholic tales usually revolved around bitter themes of paralyzing isolation and derailed desire, proved itself an exception to this rule on Sunday night. AMC, which had broken up in 1995 after a 12-year run and a handful of critically acclaimed albums that made an underground star of sad-sack singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel, is back together and is touring to promote its new album, ''Love Songs for Patriots."
From the first notes of the waltz-time reverie ''Gary's Song," from 1987's ''Engine," the band was instantly its old self, sloughing off the years as if they were mere trivia. Eitzel, whose post-AMC solo work could at times be monochromatic and moribund without the emboldened clang and clamor of his cohorts, was a fireball of emotional electricity clad in black-and-white cowboy fringe: fierce and tender, self-deprecating and self-loathing, and angry at the presidential election's outcome -- Eitzel dedicated the furious new ''Ladies & Gentlemen" to ''the Massachusetts secessionist movement." But he also was seemingly grateful to take solace inside the seclusion of his songs.
As with Morphine's Mark Sandman, Eitzel's amber voice was bourbon flecked with rust and honey; its rich noir personality more than compensated for its lack of virtuoso prowess. Meanwhile, the music colliding around him -- a beautifully violent thunderstorm of dazzling crescendos and climaxes that came courtesy of bassist Dan Pearson, single-monikered guitarist Vudi, and drummer Tim Mooney (plus newcomer Jason Borger, who augmented the group on organ) -- was lavish and mercurial.
''Patriot's Heart," a stingingly terrific new song about shiny faades concealing squalor and decay, sat seamlessly alongside older ones like the dank, dissolute ''Outside This Bar."
Despite Eitzel's onstage admission that he has resolved never to fall in love again because it never works out, few songs capture so wholly the woozy, vertiginous euphoria of that experience as Eitzel's ''Why Won't You Stay" and ''Another Morning." The latter seemed a hopeful new song about holding out for the possibility of joy.
If you paid close attention, you could almost see a ray of light cutting through the darkness.
Reviewed by Jonathan Perry for The Boston Globe for November 10th 2004