Album: American Music Club

The Golden Age, Cooking Vinyl

Critical acclaim has never been the issue for Mark Eitzel or his American Music Club. The bottom-of-the-bottle bard has been producing music of varying excellence for some 20 years now and has been proclaimed "America's best songwriter" by Rolling Stone. AMC's ninth album returns to the musical landscape of the band's finest hour, 1988's 'California'. Its gentle, sweeping sound shuffles along behind the balm of Eitzel's voice that betrays a new-found sense of acceptance and, whisper it, optimism. Here, even the end of the world is "beautiful". Golden age? Time will tell. Reputation untarnished.

Download this: The positively jaunty 'Decibels and the Little Pills'