Everclear

In my opinion their best album, "Everclear" features many of Mark Eitzel's best songs.

"Why Won't You Stay" is the ultimate track for an old flame's compilation tape, full of yearning and self-deprecation. "Ex-Girlfriend" is a brutal assessment of a friend's attempts to recover from the end of a relationship, so brutal (so the story goes) that after hearing the song, the friend in question refused to speak to Eitzel again. "Crabwalk" is a twisted hoe-down with some of Eitzel's most accomplished lyrical couplets and "Sick of Food" takes on metaphoric themes of alcoholism, anorexia and destructive relationships. "Dead Part of You" sees the full force of the singer's anger unleashed - 'he has taken everything - there's so little of you left' - he wails over a frantically strummed acoustic. "Royal Cafe" offers some respite in it's upbeat multi layered guitar work out and "Jesus Hands" closes the album - a literal last chance saloon of a composition with the protagonist seeking companionship, self worth and redemption through the bottom of a glass.

Eitzel's in fine voice, fine observational mode and at times good humour. Don't believe everything you hear - there is rarely an absence of any hope in AMC's unhappiness. Bruce Kaphan's reverb submerged production still splits opinion but at the time this was the best produced AMC album - at times shimmering, at times powerful, at all times exceptional.

Start saving up now for the rest...

As good as these songs are, though, the best here (Why Won't You Stay?, Ex-Girlfriend and Sick Of Food) are simply devastating. The only peers here are The Cure's Disintegration and Red House Painters' Medicine Bottle, the sheer depth of emotion on display takes my breath away, makes me gulp.

By the way, these are all recommendations.

The last three songs move away from this and hint at the direction AMC would take with Mercury and then San Francisco. Airier arrangements and serene, though still beautiful, melodies.

This is an album without peer, I can't imagine how my life would have turned out without it.

Not that Everclear is particularly upbeat- the darkest AMC-record advancing on the bleak-domain of 1989's Hula Maiden (which dealt with the holiday Eitzel was meant to take with his father- who died; Eitzel went to Hawai alone...); Everclear is seen as something of an elegy to friends & lovers (speculation, mind you...) surrounding Eitzel (who is the songwriter). It's easily a contender for the bleakest record of all time- though beauty balances throughout, thanks to member/producer Bruce Kaphan & Vudi's guitar overload.

AMC had already written a wealth of classics (Western Sky, Gary's Song, Firefly, Kathleen, Blue & Grey Shirt etc) & as Eitzel's solo-classic Songs of Love (which preceded Everclear) proved, it was already a potent back-catalogue. Hence the devotion...but here Eitzel's songwriting peaked & everything came together (no coincidence that several of the tracks feature in the reformed AMC's set).

Death permeates the air- from opener Why Won't You Stay ("I'm checking your pulse as you're so quiet") to the uneasy sonic-maelstrom Sick of Food (where Mercury begins to figure), to the acoustic-misery of The Dead Part of You ("...there's so little of it left"). But there's a nod to something higher- single Rise attempts to transcend all the gloom ("Tell me how to make something beautiful flash before your eyes"), though it concludes it all seems a bit futile in the light of death ("money never buys enough of ANYTHING"). Cobain, Morrissey & Stipe are complete lightweights compared- Eitzel's peers Astral-Van, Nick Cave & Leonard Cohen.

It's not all downer-rock- Royal Cafe is a pretty-little-ditty, while Miracle on 8th Street & What the Pillar...explore more acoustic climes. Even funnier is Crabwalk (the one that Eitzel cracks up during on Songs of Love), which sounds like The Mavericks 'if they read Kierkegaard' (...dig the post-modern intertextual reference yet?). I always think about Denis Johnson's writing in relation to Eitzel (the bleak American thing?), & the "sits at home sad & lonely/no one has any pity for the life of the party," reminds me of the Dennis Leary-character in the film of Johnson's Jesus'Son: it sounds euphoric as hell- like Leary's character when he makes enough to get royally-wasted- but in the end it doesn't last & you're cold in a chair in a cheap room (...the after-song The Confidential Agent, surely a title for a missing Graham Greene novel, turns that cheap room into a kind of heaven).

Oh, heaven knows they were miserable then- another person's misery becomes another's lifeblood; this really is one of the records' I can't live without (the AMC-back-catalogue is in need of reissue, especially after their truimphant return with Love Songs for Patriots). The two songs that are probably my favourite AMC-moments are Ex-Girlfriend & the closing Jesus'Hands and, I think, the strongest tracks on the LP. The former sounds like at the least, a miserable Cheever/Yates-style story, or at best, a story to rival Longtime Companion or A Home at the End of the World. Eitzel writes from an interesting perspective- a friend bumps into another friend's ex-girlfriend, "Your ex-girlfriend told me you were having a bad time...bad habits make our decisions for us..."- it's not made specific, the song could be about other forms of destruction & immolation (but you can't help thinking of the initials A,D,H,I,S, & V...). The guitars howl finally as Eitzel notes, "I guess you've got no one- I guess you've got no one- I guess you've got no one, "-the song gives up, "take care of you."

Jesus Hands'is more positive, the beauty at the end of the album- & a definite model for REM's Find the River the following year. Dobro & slide-guitar come together in what sounds like an "end of credits"-song, Eitzel singing a soul song to his brothers & sisters. Eitzel is sticking around, however miserable it seems, "I got places to go, people to see, I got a thirst that would make the ocean proud," perhaps this is Eitzel's equivalent of Neil Young's On the Beach? All this useless beauty (PM-ref-alert)doesn't help & despite the prettiness, a shift in emphasis reminds you this is a death-record,"I got nowhere to go, no one to see, and a thirst that would make the ocean proud." The holiness doesn't help- addiction, depression, diseases...Everclear is that kind of record. Probably album of the 1990s in case you wondered...