American Music Club: Love Songs For Patriots : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for all the good that's in you to shine," announces American Music Club singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel at the outset of the band's first album in about a decade, four original members (plus newcomer Marc Capelle on piano and trumpet) still on board. So, has one of alternative rock's longest-lived mopers turned over a new leaf? Not really -- he sings that line, and some others on this record that might appear optimistic on paper, in a despondent if muted death wail rather at odds with the sentiments of the words. Yet that shades-of-gray (mostly gray) collision of music and lyrics is part of what makes AMC both interesting and energy-sapping. Eitzel fearlessly details the downbeat in articulate songs about depression, male strippers, guilt and doomed affection as the band shadows his moves with appropriately lurching, artful sluggishness, like a ship determined to sink with dignity.