Pitchfork

In 2004, American Music Club returned from a 10-year hiatus to release Love Songs for Patriots, an angry wartime record that occasionally abandoned their usual palette of soft grays and browns for a fiery-red crunch. On smoldering rockers like "Ladies and Gentlemen" and "Patriot's Heart", AMC's Mark Eitzel was a bar-stool prophet calling the nation to account for its moral hypocrisies and empty promises. These polemics, rendered as character sketches, were softened by the profound empathy the singer displayed toward his subjects. Four years later, we're still at war, and like many of us, Eitzel seems to have found his anger shading into weariness. There are still flashes of bile: "The Sleeping Beauty" makes time, amid its autumnal romanticism, to fire a potshot at "the bankers, the liars, and the thieves" that "want to sell you into a life of fear," while on "The Dance", a cop's sunglasses "show the world who's on the winning team." But by and large, The Golden Age is a relentlessly interior record, from the contemplative nature of its quiet arrangements to its dreamy, sentimental lyrics.

Besides exceptionality and archetypal purity, golden ages are typified by brevity. As such, AMC's The Golden Age is appropriately obsessed with the hemorrhaging of time; many songs here find Eitzel grasping at the stuff even as it spurts through his fingers. "It's hard to love when you only see the dust," he mopes amid the wistful acoustic arpeggios of "All My Love". Eitzel's view of life as something one snatches from death's clutches, bit by bit, is the motif that drives the album. "Time is a current that only flows from warm hands to warm heart," he asserts on the darkly rushing "Decibels and Little Pills", after observing that "names are only good for grave stones."

It's undeniable that, as a lyricist, Eitzel works in homilies and clichés. "The Sleeping Beauty" finds him driving over the dead leaves of a southern town, watching someone wave goodbye in his rearview mirror. On "The Stars", a monochromatic dirge with a prismatic rock chorus, he sings, "We marry our fear/ But what makes the night not so deep/ Is someone watching over us/ While we sleep." And on "Who You Are", he offers, "I'm stuck in my confusion/ I hope you'll go far/ You're chased by the horizon/ Because you know who you are." Frankly, these lyrics might be intolerable if melodrama were Eitzel's thing. But his gruff gentility, and his masterful command of his voice, redeems them. In going for the soft-sell, the light touch with the heavy sentiment, Eitzel doesn't try to make more of his truisms than they are, letting their time-worn wisdom carry their own weight.

It's the same story with the music: AMC works a deceptively simplistic vein of shadowy Americana, characterized by seductive blurs of acoustic guitar, twinkling leads, and circular compositions that complement the album's obsession with the wheel of time. There's just enough variation to keep it from being homogeneous: "The John Berchman Victory Choir" proceeds as a series of pauses and flourishes, breaking the album's metronomic regularity; the organ-fueled "All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco" (one of a pair of picturesque odes to Eitzel's hometown) bounces instead of slinking; and "The Windows on the World", a character-driven meditation on the tourist's urge to scale great heights, sloshes woozily. American Music Club's central values-- humility, self-effacement through musical understatement, sentimental candor-- may be currently out of fashion, but The Golden Age proves that, handled with care, they never truly go out of style.