Articles:Your Flesh - Winter/Spring 1989: Difference between revisions

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 Their new album ''[[California]]'', justifies a great deal of effort, too. It's a less immediate album than ''[[Engine]]'', and needs more time to sink in - parts of it went right by me the first two or three times I heard it. Eitzel sings several songs in a muttering half-whisper, as though to himself. It's not as consistent as '[[Engine]]'' either; on '[[Engine]]'', just about every song stands out, while here there are a few throwaways, a lot of melodrama (though even that gets to you after a while, as in "[[Jenny]]" where Eitzel sings in a horse stage-whisper and tries so hard to sound tragic that eventually he succeeds) and one near-clunker, the sweepingly pretentious "[[Highway 5]]", which sounds like a bad outtake from the last Leonard Cohen album. But it also contains some of the band's best work.
-The album, at first listen, sounds more optimistic than '[[Engine]]'', and it's certainly got a lusher, richer sound - lots of swirling guitars, even some pedal steel, I think. (This isn't surprising when you consider that '[[Engine]]'' was mostly set in Columbus, Ohio, certainly a less-lush setting than California.)
+The album, at first listen, sounds more optimistic than ''[[Engine]]'', and it's certainly got a lusher, richer sound - lots of swirling guitars, even some pedal steel, I think. (This isn't surprising when you consider that ''[[Engine]]'' was mostly set in Columbus, Ohio, certainly a less-lush setting than California.)
-The mood is not quite as unrelievedly grim as it was on '[[Engine]]''; there are even a couple of relatively upbeat moments, such as the musically, if not lyrically, lighthearted "[[Lonely]]", and the slightly silly "[[Bad Liquor]]", in which Eitzel almost pokes fun at himself. ("You wanna have some fun?/No way!") And where '[[Engine]]'' expressed the theory that "outside this bar/There's no one alive", here, Eitzel insists that "Somewhere/there's people living", with a sort of incredulous hope. Still, the echoes the record leaves are, if anything, even more disturbing than the tone of '[[Engine]]''.
+The mood is not quite as unrelievedly grim as it was on ''[[Engine]]''; there are even a couple of relatively upbeat moments, such as the musically, if not lyrically, lighthearted "[[Lonely]]", and the slightly silly "[[Bad Liquor]]", in which Eitzel almost pokes fun at himself. ("You wanna have some fun?/No way!") And where ''[[Engine]]'' expressed the theory that "outside this bar/There's no one alive", here, Eitzel insists that "Somewhere/there's people living", with a sort of incredulous hope. Still, the echoes the record leaves are, if anything, even more disturbing than the tone of ''[[Engine]]''.
 The prettiest songs here - "[[Firefly]]", "[[Blue And Grey Shirt]]", and the heartbreaking "[[Western Sky]]" are about loss, despair and how "the parade has passed us by." And the last song, the final impression you're left with, is the most hopeless: "Falling/And I can't see the bottom/Are you gonna be my last harbour?"
-Where '[[Engine]]'' focused on a series of depressing incidents, ''[[California]]'' seems to have as it's main theme the issue of simply how bad things are in general, and that's even scarier.
+Where ''[[Engine]]'' focused on a series of depressing incidents, ''[[California]]'' seems to have as it's main theme the issue of simply how bad things are in general, and that's even scarier.
 It's been said that unhappiness produces the greatest art, and if that's true, [[American Music Club]] should be turning out brilliant records for the rest of its career. To repeat myself, and at the risk of sounding trite, this is a band that means it, that feels every bit of the pain and exaltation in their songs, and the fact that they manage to communicate all that feeling is what makes them important. So go ahead, run right out and buy the latest CMJ chart-topper. Me, I'll be happily depressing myself with [[American Music Club]].