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

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 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]]''.