You know what pisses me off. Those people on Amazon.com who write their lists of favourites, spouting effusively like a captured spy who's recently taken their cyanide pill and is foaming uncontrollably at the mouth about their horrendous taste in 'music'.
e.g.
this person
It is no different from graffiti artists who write their 'tag' on any newly painted surface that they see, terrorists blowing up public transportation systems. It is a desperate desire to be noticed, to feel important, to rail against the certain knowledge that nobody gives a flying f*ck about you and even less of flying f*ck if you listen to Mariah Carey or Alice in Chains or The Shins.
I don't want to be recommended to buy anything, thank you very much. Amazon itself (along with other websites) is desperate to send me lists of books and things it has decided I will like. So I once bought a John Ridley novel from them (the excellent Everyone Smokes in Hell). Does not mean I want to buy A copy of Los Angeles Without a Map or Permanent Midnight (which tangentially are both also set in LA and feature losers). I once bought a Propaganda CD of their wonderful album A Secret Wish. I do not want a bloody Flock of Seagulls CD. Yes they were both 1980s bands and could have been categorised as 'new wave' But A Flock Of Seagulls are to Propaganda what Kenny G is to John Coltrane, or Paul Nicholas to Chic.
There's a whole lot to be said about the corporate desperation to categorise, niche market and force feed us cultural artefacts. I am not the only person who will listen to Public Enemy and Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks in one sitting. I am not the only person who reads Dickens and Dennis Lehane. In fact everybody I know has a broad and eclectic taste. Who are these people that exist in such a narrow world that they will only watch one kind of movie, listen to one kind of music or read one kind of book? (the answer actually is Conservative small-minded Americans, but that's beside the point. My question was rhetorical)
Anyway, all this is a preamble to the only review I ever wrote and put on Amazon. There were no reviews of The American Music Club album 'California' at the time. It was 1999 and I reproduce it below.
California was the pinnacle of AMC's career, and perhaps Mark Eitzel's writing. Each great band has an album where they are on effortless top form. Everything comes together.
Eitzel's songs can be rambling and abstract, self consciously arty and sometimes gruelling, but on this album each song is concise, melodious and framed by a fluid and shimmering, but punchy production.
Beauty and subtlety abounds in the music, with Vudi's guitar reigned in from the noisy slabs of Engine. Here, on Blue and Grey shirt and Western Sky we have atmospheric and tuneful fills with the accent on 'less is more'. In reviews of the time, much was made of the use of pedal steel, but this was an inspired choice that served the songs rather than a ginmick. How many alt-country bands now use pedal steel as a tool of atmosphere these days?
Great bands make albums that have no filler. California is a perfect cycle of love loss and melancholy. Side one (Firefly thru Blue and Grey Shirt) especially is made up of five songs that simply could not be improved. The 7 or 8 seconds silence in the middle of laughingstock only serves to provide a perfect centre to this sequence. After the drunken rant of Bad Liquor that opens side 2 , a slight optimism takes over, just to help the fatally broken-hearted a tiny bit.
Eitzel's voice is rich in character. Pathetic, intimate, passionate, despairing, drunk, hopeful and resigned. He never again managed to match the form and songs to the texture of his singing.
California was too subtle to be a massive hit and is even out of print now. It's a cruel world.
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