This album falls somewhere in the overlap of the Venn diagram of country / Americana and indie music. Throughout, it maddeningly reminded me of other groups, especially during the somewhat more upbeat opening track Firefly, complete with steel guitar. Kind of like Buffalo Springfield and REM had a baby. Counting Crows? Hothouse Flowers? Hootie & the Blowfish? Deacon Blue? Mumford & Sons? American Music Club fall into the genre given the dreadful name “slowcore”, a blend of American folk and country pushed through an indie filter.
As such, it tends towards a fairly downbeat, low-key, beautiful bleakness. Mark Eitzel, vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter, weaves a world of loneliness - Last Harbour, for example, is a delicate guitar arpeggio backing a song about lonely desperation, the narrator lost in a world of despair, seeing a woman in a bar as “She's almost your passport to the world. She's almost your ticket out again”.
Darkness and cold are woven through Eitzel’s lyrics. The track Lonely says “I fall onto my bed like snow” (bring to mind yet another band, Fleet Foxes). Western Sky is a plaintive break-up song about letting somebody go to let them thrive without you (and perhaps, the narrator is running away) - “The world's a shadow of what went before”.
For me, the zenith of the album is Pale And Skinny Girl. Slow, bleak, beautiful, the song suggests a vacant girl lost in addiction (“lives inside a mountain”), looking for her next fix (“She walks across a parking lot, with two quarters in her hand. She just wants to take a little break from nothing”), but also blends in a kind of post-apocalyptic survival aesthetic - “Outside the air pocket, there's no one around. She's frozen with terror like an animal. Baby take your first walk out into the wasteland. On every horizon, nothing”.
There’s a single, short, upbeat tempo track that feels horribly out of place - Bad Liquor (sung through Mark E Smith style distortion). Although sometimes with these downbeat albums it can be nice to get a breather, here it really took me out of the pleasant melancholy of the album. For all that it’s called “California”, there’s nothing sunny about it, it’s all snow and shadows.
But who does it remind me of?
Comments
Post a Comment