ome people say our music is depressing? I listen to Paula Abdul, I get depressed
Mark Eitzel, singer with American Music Club, somewhere in the 90s.

Over the course of their eleven-year career from 1984-1995, the San Francisco band American Music Club produced seven great albums, played countless intense live shows, and made some of the worst business decisions of any band in the history of the world, bar none. At times, when their career was slipping from the merely misguided towards the out-and-out farcical (Getting the drummer’s wife to be your manager? Haven’t you even heard of ‘This is Spinal Tap’?), it was all I could do to stop myself from getting on a plane to San Francisco and beating some sense into their singer/songwriter/chief curmudgeon, Mark Eitzel. I used to think Sophocles’ Oedipus stood alone in its mastery of dramatic irony. Now I know otherwise: just read Sean Body’s history of AMC, Wish the World Away. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry; mostly, you’ll cry.

Yet throughout all of the turmoil the band slogged on, producing album after album of, in Eitzel’s words, “pretentious little songs of quiet self-loathing”. It wasn’t enough: in 1995, frustrated with their inability to translate acclaim into cash (and perhaps also suffering from the loss of their multi-instrumentalist Bruce Kaphan the year before, the guy most often credited with holding everything together), the band split. The various members found other bands and/or production jobs, Eitzel having the most success with a sporadically fascinating solo career that saw him flirt with everything from upbeat guitar pop (West, recorded with REM’s Peter Buck) to home-produced ProTools malarkey (2001’s The Invisible Man, to my ears the high watermark of his post-AMC career). But whatever he did and wherever he played, one question always remained in the minds of the hopeful: come on, Mark, when are you going to get the band back together? And, Missions From God not withstanding, it looked like it might never happen.

And so we come to AD 2004; with hindsight, a year of miracles. Following the current fashion for 10-years-broken-up indie bands to reform (it is spooky, isn’t it?), AMC have done just that, and are currently touring the US. There’s an album of new material in the works, too; but before all of that, the first new product from the band is American Music Club: 1984-1995, a career retrospective that includes tracks from all seven albums and finds time to fit in a few demos, live tracks, and scattered obscurities. But I’m at a loss as to who it’s aimed at: if it’s a formal introduction to the band for newcomers, why issue it only through your website? If it’s a ‘thank you’ to old fans, why not go the whole hog and round up all of those stray AMC tracks that appeared on currently out-of-print compilations? (‘All Your Jeans Were Too Tight’, from 1992’s No Alternative, would be a good start).

But, leaving aside questions of its target market, the disc is a joy. Things kick off well with ‘Sick of Food’ from 1991’s Everclear and never really stray from the path of righteousness (apart from histrionic demo ‘I Always Knew’, featuring a guitar solo that sounds like a stray cat being giving a right good seeing too). 'Sick of Food' features lashings of the thick, anguished guitar noise that colours their best songs (more late-period Talk Talk than Husker Du), tempered with some great examples of the black, bitter wit of Eitzel: “I'm sick of drink, so why am I so thirsty? I must have been born on the planet Mercury”, and, throughout this album, it’s this dynamic that drives the band: while their songs could sound just fine as played by a solo Eitzel (as the live disc Songs of Love: Live from 1991 demonstrates), things really slip into gear when the whole band is playing. Just listen to the harmonies that bassist Dan Pearson adds to ‘If I Had a Hammer’, the subtle bleeds of feedback that lead guitarist Vudi adds to ‘Laughing Stock’, the solid backing that drummer Tim Mooney gives to the crashing dissonance of ‘Challenger’. If you’ve never heard the band, you owe it to yourself to pick up this CD; hell, pick up their back catalogue, too, and see what you’ve been missing. But do me a favour: if you see them before I do, sit them down in front of that DVD, and play them the antics of St. Hubbins and co. from start to finish. Because, this time, I will get on that plane.