Description:
"Unhappy with bandmate Vudi`s lack of input on American Music Club`s 2004 album Love Songs For Patriots, the band`s singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel decided here to increase the guitarist`s involvement by recording near Vudi`s Los Angeles home. The results are closer to the band`s original tone of melancholy defeatism, and just as wreathed in the stifling fog of their hometown San Francisco, with pallid arrangements backdropping the devotional promise of "All My Love" and the doomed relationship of "The Stars". Eitzel`s pessimism colours everything: in "The John Berchman Victory Choir", consolation is seen as self-delusion, while inevitable failure hangs over a girl`s attempt to "fill the dark" with snatched intimacy in "Decibels and the Little Pills". Elsewhere, "The Dance" is a modern murder ballad and "I Know That`s Not Really You" a galumphing mariachi waltz; but it`s Eitzel`s disengagement from mainstream ambitions and San Francisco`s indulgence of such bohemianism that dominate; a world where "Everyone is humming a love supreme/ And watching it pour softly down the hill". -- Andy Gill, The Independent (Merge)
