The 2004 return of the American Music Club to official recording took a lot of people by surprise—and went completely unnoticed by a lot more. It had been ten years since the AMC’s dissolution, and twelve since Mercury provided the final third of the group’s early-90s trilogy of sad minor masterpieces; since then, frontman Mark Eitzel had pursued the kind of solo career that awaits the talented artist whose particular brand of self-destruction isn’t quite groovy enough to buoy his fame. Alcoholism doesn’t sell like it used to.

Given the lackluster track record of reformations of previously beloved bands, it’s surprising that Love Songs for Patriots is a success. Not a blazing, heart-stopping success, but then neither was Everclear, the band’s 1991 pinnacle, an album made of hazy glass already half-cracked when you started listening. Many of the immediately arresting moments on Everclear—the almost-successful slice of anthemic alt-rock “Rise”; the strange bar-band romp “Crabwalk”—fade upon subsequent listens, overshadowed by the songs you had to force yourself not to skip the first time. At its best the AMC deals in slow revelations, and most of Love Songs for Patriots is no exception; while the post-9/11 roar of opener “Ladies and Gentlemen” and the shambling soar of “Only Love Can Set You Free” will get you to buy the album, it’s the awkward, morosely funny poetry of “The Horseshoe Wreath in Bloom” and the nightwind-gentle doom narrative “Song of the Rats Leaving the Sinking Ship” that’ll keep you from selling it.

Love Songs for Patriots, then, is a pleasant return to recording, if not quite to form, of America’s best hangover band—or at least it would be, if not for two songs that make it one of the AMC’s best records, a record worth putting on the shelf next to Everclear, and a record, in case you were wondering, worth talking about two years after its acceptably publicized release.

The first is “Another Morning,” a half-love song of unparalleled deftness whose locomotive percussion carries it from crystal-clear acoustic guitar and gently accusatory lyrics through the effortlessly timed entrance of layers of electric guitar to an unfailingly blissful climax, where Mark Eitzel exhales some of his most justifiably sappy lyrics—”When you laugh like the starting-gun at the start of the race”—and brings the three-minute confection to a graceful close, pulling one of his band’s most sublime creations over the finish line with breath to spare. That all Eitzel’s descriptions of his subject’s laugh can be as readily applied to the song itself is some kind of miracle, especially given the small common ground usually drawn between a starting-gun and, say, “the wind burning the sun blind on your face.”

Perhaps even more successful than the lush pop of “Another Morning,” though, is the trembling minimalism of “Mantovani the Mind Reader,” an unfailingly affecting character study that gets by on nothing but two pianos and a distant, echoing timpani—and on Eitzel’s warm drawl of a voice, which makes heartbreak out of lyrics like the masterful enumeration “Knows what’s in your wallet / Knows what turns your keys / Knows what heats up your lover / Knows what makes them freeze,” and floats the wooden frame of the music from smoky nightclubs to snowy streets to lovers’ bedrooms and back again. “Mantovani” is a song of small details—Eitzel’s painstaking enunciation of the word “marvelous” in the song’s climax got this on every mix CD I made for two years, appropriately or not—and the bare, metronomic instrumentation is as much a part of its unity of purpose as is Eitzel’s sparse poetry. This sort of thing might just bring the bottle back.

[buy stuff here]