[news] YOU FORGOT POLAND

"Is this site pro, or anti?" my coworker asked. But that's not the question. The question is,

You forgot Poland!

[music] AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB - Love Songs For Patriots (Merge)

At first, I thought this had a good first half (this sounds like American Music Club!) and a weak second half (must be leftover Eitzel solo tracks). After a second listen I am almost certain this is straight-up brilliant through the end, but oddly constructed and a lot to digest all at once.

The centerpiece is track 3 out of 13, which is what's funny about the sequencing: the six-minute "Patriot's Heart" comes the closest to explaining what the album's title means. Its star is a stripper whose audience is just as ruined as he is; they continue to destroy each other looking for their salvation, and Mark Eitzel captures their thoughts so artfully that you're tempted to believe they're making the best of a bad situation even though gosh, at the beginning of the song, before you sank into the morass with them, it seemed like audience or dancer, if not both, could just get up and leave.

Beyond the phrase "patriot's heart" and one or two throwaway jokes, the track has no explicit connection to politics, but I have no doubt as to what the point is. All thirteen of these songs are about self-knowledge and self-deception in their murkiest forms, with a touch of the bleakest encouragement imaginable. "Time to unbutton every button of your cowardice," Eitzel sings in the opener.

This is the kind of politically-driven-but-not-political album that R.E.M.'s publicity tried to bill Around The Sun as a few months ago-- there's no shouting, but it's fueled by anger and disappointment. I may be reading too much into the whole thing, of course; when Eitzel says the gay stripper "knows that your good time will kill him" and I instantly think of the American public as the stripper, am I picking up a nuance, or just exposing my own psyche?

(I'm trying to remember now if Eitzel has written any queer characters before. I certainly don't know all his lyrics by heart, especially on recent solo albums. He was relatively open about being bisexual by the time I saw him on tour in 1996.)

But I don't think the limb I'm heading out on is so thin. At the very least, the sequencing (flesh-rending songs in the first half, milder songs in the second) suggests the first half is fully intended to be as harrowing as it is, which reinforces the idea that there must be something tying it together...

I don't even listen anymore when someone tells me a band's reunion album sounds just like the band never broke up; nothing has ever lived up to that. This does. Except for one forgettable track that sounds more like solo Eitzel and the absence of Bruce Kaphan's pedal steel, Love Songs could have been made the year after Mercury. Actually, it's a more plausible extension of Mercury's sound than San Francisco was.

Bar-folk? Coffeehouse rock? I wouldn't be sure how to describe this to someone that wasn't a fan, which is too bad, since I feel the missionary's zeal coming on. mp3 streams available at Merge Records.