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| A DISCOMFITED SAN Francisco International Film Festival staffer came out onstage to read an American Music Club missive before the start of the silent film Street Angel and the band's live accompaniment. Announcing that the event hailed from the "New Literalism" school of art, it warned those averse to displays of "naked emotion" to chart their exit route immediately.
This was a little too cute, and unnecessary, given the combined two audiences that half-filled the Palace of Fine Arts: silent-film groupies, a demographic as high-strung and fussy as it is minute, and American Music Club loyalists, who by now are pushing toward or past age 50 (as are the band members). AMC were never a happily here-and-now, wiseass, aren't-we-modern unit, despite having started in the high new wave era. Their sound was always an ephemeral past tense of roots music heard from a passing car on a lost highway; their sentiments were middle-aged ones of regret, disillusionment, and tender-if-sure-to-be-dashed hope. It's logical that AMC should follow us past youth, since they'd given up on it from the start. As familiarity generally lightens pain, so there's more joy (however complicated) and humor in their later music than one could have imagined from the beautiful, absolute desolation of California (Frontier, 1988) or United Kingdom (Demon, 1990). So now American Music Club are back after a decade-plus, during which members pursued other projects that invariably felt a little thinner. The "comeback" CD Love Songs for Patriots (Merge, 2004) has two great tracks and a reassuring recognition factor, yet it's a bit scattered, suggesting that a collective groove can't be rebuilt overnight. (Their 1994 album on Reprise, San Francisco, suggested that it falls apart by degrees too.) They're having to face the same old problems of being a semi-unpopular band with a fervent but awkwardly spread cult audience – by the time you read this, they'll be packing for a few club dates in Portugal and Spain. The point when you have nothing left to prove is perhaps a good time to try new things. Ergo, the surprise of AMC doing a commissioned score for 1928's Street Angel, a late silent that was the second of three movies Frank Borzage made with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, Fox Studio's then-leading love duo. All are penny dreadful romantic melodramas rendered sublime by the director's visual artistry and ability to imbue pulp sentiments with almost overwhelming real emotion. Angel may be the silliest, being the story of a penniless Naples waif (Gaynor) who tries – unsuccessfully – to prostitute herself for the sake of a dying mother's prescription but gets hauled off by la polizia anyway. She runs away with the circus (really), meets a "vagabond artist" (Farrell), and experiences infinitely wistful, chaste, ideal first love before yea more tragic hurdles require leaping over, at length. AMC are a great band, but there's no getting around the Mark Eitzel Element, which tends to inspire either fiercely personal devotion, or geez-get-a-life harrumphs from sad sack-ophobes. His confessional theater can't really accompany anybody else's. Wisely, then, the quartet, in collaboration with composer Marc Capelle (a de facto fifth member these days), kept vocals to a minimum, incorporating part of Patriots' "Love Is" at one point, and a new song called "Take Me Home" as a recurrent theme. These are AMC and Eitzel at their most plaintively sweet and direct. Still, pouring music with lyrics on top of visual storytelling with dialogue intertitles (especially ones as sufficient as "Love is like the measles. When it comes, you cannot stop it") may inevitably equal communication overload. For the most part, however, Eitzel stuck to acoustic guitar while percussionist Tim Mooney and multi-instrumentalists Vudi, Danny Pearson, and Capelle wove gorgeous passages from ideas that have long been part of the AMC cloth and were especially apt here: carnival cacophony, sea chantey, ambient lyricism, the sonic intersections between the ethereal and the everyday. Using two whistlers as guest musicians was so perfect it seemed just a lucky bonus that on-screen Farrell is one too, and in the end, the group's refracted Americana proved an unexpected just-right fit for Borzage's hyperreal "Italy," all expressionist studio sets and light softened almost to mist. The art form had developed such that the best late silents can seem timeless, less tied to outdated technology or fashion than almost any "talkies." Similarly, American Music Club's emotional immediacy and whole-grain "folk rock" – if any one genre can be applied – create something both private and universal at their best. Maybe they should next take a look at Murnau's Sunrise, King Vidor's The Crowd, or even some Buster Keaton. Review by Dennis Harvey for The San Francisco Bay Guardian May 4th 2005 Return to Homepage Here |