American Music Club Everclear CD

American Music Club: Dan Pearson (vocals, guitar, banjo, mandolin, dulcimer, bass); Mark Eitzel (vocals, guitar, keyboards); Vudi (guitar, accordion, bass); Bruce Kaphan (guitar, pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, dobro, dulcimer, keyboards, bass, percussion); Mike Simms (drums).
Producers: Bruce Kaphan, American Music Club, Norman Kerner.
Engineers: Bruce Kaphan, Tom Carr, Norman Kerner.
Recorded at Music Annex Studio A, Menlo Park, California, Soma Sync Studios and Brilliant Studios, San Francisco, California.
American Music Club: Mark Eitzel (vocals, guitar, keyboards).
Personnel: Dan Pearson (vocals, guitar, banjo, dulcimer, mandolin); Bruce Kaphan (guitar, steel guitar, lap steel guitar, dobro, dulcimer, keyboards, percussion); Vudi (guitar, accordion); Mike Simms (drums).
Audio Mixers: Joe Chiccarelli; Bruce Kaphan.
Recording information: Brilliant Studios, San Francisco, CA; Music Annex Recording Studios, Studio A, Menlo Park, CA; Soma Sync Studios, San Francisco, CA.
Photographer: Beth Herzhaft.
Put simply, Everclear is American Music Club's masterpiece. Benefiting immensely from improved production values, the album crystallizes the band's often erratic vision into a unified, endlessly complex whole. While the arrangements are typically diffuse -- "Crabwalk" is shambling rockabilly, "Royal Cafe" is sweet country-pop, and "Rise" is anthemic alt-rock -- there is a consistency of tone and a sense of place that runs through these songs that is absent from the band's other records. Similarly, Mark Eitzel's compositions achieve an uncommon emotional balance, never once slipping into pathos or melodrama; the atmospheric "Miracle on 8th Street" and "The Confidential Agent" offer cinéma vérité evocations of relationships at the breaking point, while the brute force of alcoholic laments like "Sick of Food" or the funereal "Why Won't You Stay" is staggering -- never before or since has this loser been quite so beautiful. ~ Jason Ankeny
EVERCLEAR, AMC's finest hour and one the '90s' most powerful albums, is simultaneously lush and searing, heartache and despair borne out in elegant arrangements that combine fragile prettiness and soul-baring howls of pain. Multi-instrumentalist Bruce Kaphan rose to the occasion of his production debut. The canyons of reverb on the instruments are strangely appropriate, highlighting the almost decadent, tragically beautiful feel of the songs. Keyboards, pedal steel, and acoustic guitars drift like abandoned ships swirling around in a colorfully tempestuous sea full of unknown nautical demons. Guitarist Vudi contributes some of the most artful, non-traditional sounds ever concocted by a "rock" axeman.
The album begins with a slow, soulful lament to a love who's either sleeping or dead, before taking up the subject of mortality more fully in the anthemic "Rise," written by Eitzel for an AIDS-stricken friend. Eitzel observes the trials of those around him on "Ex-Girlfriend," but "Sick of Food" turns his gaze inward, breathlessly describing his alienation from virtually everything and his simultaneous longing for connection. His disaffection grows more urgent on "The Dead Part of You," but by the closing folky ballad "Jesus' Hands," Eitzel's delivering a plea for redemption that finds him strangely at peace with contentment's evanescence.Spin (9/91) - Highly Recommended - "...Songwriter Mark Eitzel is a very moving singer and lyricist...this is an album to return to time and time again..."
Q (12/91) - 4 Stars - Excellent - "...an everclear, blooming production which never compromises an understated, ghostly ambience... should broaden the growing fan base..."
Melody Maker (12/91) - Ranked #8 in Melody Maker's list of the top 30 albums of 1991 - "...painfully intense..."