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The Golden Age

by

American Music Club

 
The Golden Age
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Avg: 3.5 (34 ratings)

Eitzel and friends get less mopey, more pretty.

  • We Say...

    Review by Matthew Fritch

    Mark Eitzel, patron saint of sad bastards, first hung his halo with San Francisco-based American Music Club way back in 1982. Over the next 13 years, the singer/songwriter — along with core members Vudi (guitar) and Dan Pearson (bass) — cast a narrow but intense ray of light on slow-burning rock songs dedicated to boozy introspection and romantic loserdom. Eitzel went on hiatus from AMC in 1995, only to reform the band eight years later for Love Songs for Patriots, an album that’s a touch twangier and more contentious than its predecessors, perhaps due to its wartime coincidence.

    War still rages around us during The Golden Age, but aside from “The Windows on the World” — a ruminative song whose title refers to the restaurant that once occupied the top floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center — American Music Club is in a particularly mellow mood. Eitzel’s trademark voice, somewhere between Morrissey moan and Dando drawl, still lays bare a weary heart. But he’s often hoping instead of hurting (opening track “All My Love” is a come-hither slow jam on fingerpicked acoustic guitar); encouraging instead of self-pitying (the ’70s soft rock affirmation “Who You Are”). As a result, The Golden Age is one of AMC’s prettiest records, with guitarist Vudi mostly muzzling his feedback forays and the band taking detours into Lambchop-like orchestral country territory. With some new blood (drummer Steve Didelot and bassist Sean Hoffman, both formerly of country outfit the Larks) and a relocation to Los Angeles (where Vudi drives a city bus), Eitzel and Co. seem sunnier than ever.

    But who buys an American Music Club album to hear a well-adjusted, content Mark Eitzel and his more polished band? Truth be told, the 49-year-old Eitzel is outgrowing his myopia and replacing it with stellar storytelling. “A Patriot’s Heart,” a character sketch of a male stripper, was the centerpiece song of 2003’s Love Songs for Patriots. On The Golden Age, he looks back at the city he just left with “The Grand Duchess of San Francisco” and “All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco,” the latter of which is a fond remembrance of the misfits, barflies and bohemians Eitzel encountered over the years. Though his bandmates and address have changed, Eitzel remains steadfast in his belief that you can go home again.

  • They Say...

    Review by Mark Deming, All Music Guide

    The news is that Mark Eitzel and Vudi have resurrected American Music Club for the first time since 2004's Love Songs for Patriots (which was in turn the group's first album in a decade), but they haven't gone terribly far out of their way to do it -- while pedal steel player Bruce Kaplan was absent from the Love Songs lineup, on 2008's The Golden Age, Eitzel and Vudi are the only holdovers from the band's original membership, with debuting bassist Sean Hoffman and percussionist Steve Didelot completing this new, leaner edition of AMC. While Love Songs attempted to evoke the grand, noisy soundscapes of albums like Everclear and Mercury, The Golden Age harks back to the more arid atmospherics of California and United Kingdom, and it does so quite well. Anyone hoping for a big dose of Vudi's fractured guitar heroics will go wanting as he aims for a more subdued tone on most tracks, saving his more outré effects for the codas of "On My Way" and "The Windows on the World." But this is easily the best set of songs Eitzel has offered since his 2001 solo effort, The Invisible Man, and his vocals are in superb form; while much of his work since AMC's breakup seemed to find him looking for a new direction, these 13 songs are just the sort of thing he does best, compelling tales of lost souls and busted hearts that reveal as much compassion as despair, and he delivers them with a weary but heartfelt authority that few others could match. And if this album doesn't break much new ground or challenge anyone's expectations of American Music Club, it also offers a clear and honest reminder of why this band made so much vital, lasting music during its original lifetime; The Golden Age may simply be the Eitzel and Vudi show, but that's more than enough to make this a rich and rewarding set of songs whose gentle surfaces belie their troubling strength.

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