Articles:Lime Lizard - April 1993: Difference between revisions

The songs on ‘Mercury’ are typically emotionally unflinching. Eitzel rails against a world which cruelly turns a blind eye to the suffering of others, be it those who have died or are dying of AIDS (the victims of which the singer calls “the true patriots of America”) or those for whom love has simply run its course, leaving them lost and alone, scared, scarred and bitter. Even the most cursory of glances at the album’s lyric sheet will reveal that Eitzel is in particularly merciless mood,tearing himself inside-out as he attempts to understand the pathetic deaths, the tortured hearts and the broken souls.

I could quote lyrics at you from here clear into the next issue, but these concerns are never more directly stated than in the fragile, aching ballad to a lost love, ‘I’ve Been A Mess’. Beginning with a consolatory mandolin and Eitzel’s broken voice singing the lines “Lazarus wasn’t grateful for his second wind/For another chance to watch his chances fade like the dawn/And me, I can barely tell you/Just how pale I get without you,” it stretches across miles of pain and hurt and ultimately leaves you at peace, able perhaps to accept, but never forget, whatever personal loss you dredge up in empathy.

It’s beautiful, although a friend called it “the most generic AMC song” she’d ever heard.

“Well,” stalls Eitzel, obviously considering and dismissing the judgment at the same time, “maybe I have reached the point where I’m just writing formulaic American Music Club songs. Maybe I’ve reached the point where aged people tend to do the things they know best. I must say I like ‘I’ve Been A Mess’. It’s got the corniest chorus in the whole world. I’ve had people tell me that it’s the worst song I’ve written in my life. But I like it. I like playing it.”

Eitzel may know how to read the map of the human heart, but his ability to capture a sense of time and place should not be overlooked. It’s this talent which marks him out as a truly great songwriter, transporting you to the bars and clubs of ‘Gary’s Song’ and ‘Crabwalk’, the lonely highway outpost of ‘Nightwatchman’ or the sun-drenched shores of Waikiki in ‘The Hula Maiden’ with little more than a few evocative lines and some subtly clever musical arrangements. Early albums have titles like ‘California’ and ‘United Kingdom’ (where, in Southampton, Eitzel spent his formative years), while songs are littered with references to various streets, establishments and cities. This habit reaches a peak on ‘Mercury’ with songs such as ‘Gratitude Walks’, ‘Hollywood 4/5/92’, ‘Dallas, Airports, Bodybags’ and ‘Challenger’, a song seemingly about contemplating suicide while in an aeroplane over Detroit.

“In pop music place names are important,” adds Vudi who, later in the week, backs up his claim by taking a tour through the areas so darkly outlined by Peter Ackroyd in the East London Gothic novel '‘Hawksmoor’. “They make songs more real. They’re so evocative and they lead your audience somewhere.”

The finest example of this feat on ‘Mercury’ is the starkly realistic ‘Over And Done’, which takes us down into the

‘underwater cave’ of Capp Street, San Francisco, a town which has been Eitzel’s home since a brief band relocation to Germany in the mid-80s. Set against a dark, chugging backdrop, he sings about ‘faces that were washed away from innocence and pain’ and being kept awake at night by ‘their sweet songs to the moon’, ending with what’s likely to be the bleakest singalong chorus of the year, ‘We had a good time, we had some fun/Now we want to get the whole thing over and done.’ For once, Eitzel seems to be an outsider, standing apart from and reporting the pain that he sees, rather than experiencing it first-hand.