22-23. American Music Club, The Golden Age, Mark Eitzel, Candy Ass

(Merge, 2008; Cooking Vinyl, 2005) Reviewed for Village Voice I don't know whether thesays something about my interest-level or Mark Eitzel's career, but I've followed the guy pretty closely, and I was completely unaware of the solo Candy Ass (echt-Eitzel title, no?) until I was assigned the new AMC. Coming between the two new-era-AMC discs, it's a collection of songwriting demos comparable to similarly-minded collections I've seen him sell on tour for years. (One tune, "The Sleeping Beauty" is reworked on The Golden Age.) Several tracks are electronic instrumentals, and not wispy oral surgery soundtracks either, but fairly 'dirty' and aggressive-sounding constructions. Eitzel is more adept with the relevant techniques than he was a few years back on The Invisible Man (the obligatory man-and-his-loops '90s solo album), but still, this is just not the thing for which he's ever going to be anyone's go-to guy. Of the song songs unique to this release, the standout is "Song of the Mole," concerning a character enraged by his positive test, with a terrific opening conceit: "He was so pissed off he was dying/he would only play Hall and Oates."