The toad's internal organs surged from its mouth as Brian's mother accidentally stepped on it. Brian had noticed the toad sitting on the grass just in time to witness its gruesome death, and stared for a few seconds before throwing up his hands and shouting, "The universe sucks!" Brian is fond of decrying the injustices of our chaotic environment, and perhaps no other single anecdote supports his rantings better. There was no reason for what happened to that toad. It just happened.
Of course, Brian's simple three-word theory is applicable everywhere, and not just in the natural world. It was at work when Beta succumbed to VHS, despite being the superior format. It's at work every time Fox cancels a good TV show and replaces it with police chase videos. And it's at work almost constantly in the music industry, a world where the Britneys and the Backstreets rule the charts while so many true artists toil in the depths of commercial hell, neglected by a public hungry for eye candy and a quick thrill.
While many artists have suffered similar fates, few have typified it the way Mark Eitzel has. Put simply, Eitzel possesses one of the most impressive oeuvres of any songwriter, living or dead. Even the perpetually clueless Rolling Stone couldn't ignore the man's genius, naming him Songwriter of the Year back in 1991. Despite his complete mastery of the craft, though, he's never seen his day in the spotlight, and at this point in his career, it seems unlikely that he ever will. The public at large isn't interested in music this brutally honest. All the more for you and me, I suppose.
Transplanted in the early 80's from his boyhood home of Columbus, Ohio to the San Francisco Bay Area, Eitzel fronted the tragically overlooked American Music Club. Over the course of AMC's seven albums, Eitzel penned some of the greatest, most heartfelt tales of degradation, struggle, and sadness in modern music, finding his muse in dank bars, empty beds and lonely nights. When AMC finally called it quits in 1994 after a stalled deal with Reprise, Eitzel struck out on his own, releasing the jazzy 60 Watt Silver Lining and the fantastic Peter Buck collaboration West on Warner before the label left him on the curb.
The good folks at Matador picked him up for 1998's cheekily titled Caught in a Trap and I Can't Back Out 'Cause I Love You Too Much Baby, a starkly beautiful album that was almost aborted due to the difficulty of making it. Three years later, Eitzel is still on his feet, though the weight of the world has hardly been lifted from his shoulders. The Invisible Man is perhaps his best solo effort yet, and nearly the equal of AMC's greatest triumph, Everclear.
Greatness, of course, is a given where Eitzel is involved, but perhaps the most stunning thing about The Invisible Man is the fact that, so many years on, he's embraced electronics and emerged with an album that sounds utterly contemporary and vital. "The Boy with the Hammer" starts things off with deeply echoed piano and Eitzel's powerful voice singing, "When the boy with the hammer in the bag stands up to cheer/ Then you stand up to cheer," as ambient washes rise like an ether fog, pushed along by a mix of skittering beats and live percussion. Eitzel has always checked Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream as influences, but they've never come to the fore like this in the past.
"Can You See?" finds Eitzel balancing his world-weariness with a newfound trace of optimism: "You say that another man's hell could be your heaven/ And if this is being blind and wrong give me more and more/ And let me light up the hand and let me pull the truth through/ But if the truth won't make you happy/ What would you do?/ The truth is that I'm happy when I'm with you." The understated electronics burbling underneath combine with knockout horn arrangement to wrap around Eitzel's confessions like a warm blanket. Goosebumps ensue.
The hilarious march of "Christian Science Reading Room" is Eitzel's black humor at its best. "I was so high/ I stood for an hour outside the Christian Science Reading Room/ And suddenly I could not resist/ I became a Christian Scientist/ And I studied light and I studied sound/ And every question that I asked was suddenly profound." He goes on to convert his cat before declaring, "I love all seven deadly sins," in the opening of "Sleep."
This is the point, where, as a reviewer, my job becomes difficult. There are thirteen songs on this album and every single one of them is tremendous in its own right. I could spend the rest of this review quoting lyrics and never truly convey the power of these songs. Eitzel has a creepy way of finding all the thoughts you have hanging next to the skeletons in your closet and conveying them succinctly and effortlessly. So rather than participate in a futile exercise like trying to describe how good this music is, I'll go for the big wrap-up and hope that I can convince you that this is totally worth listening to.
It's way too early to declare anything the Album of the Year, but I will say that this one holds the top spot on my list by a long shot so far. Eitzel and his small group of talented cohorts have created a textured soundtrack to the outpourings of a broken heart that never once intrudes on the honesty of the proceedings. Every bleep and skitter is there to serve the song. Exploring new territory while maintaining the emotional weight of your material is rarely a working prospect for an artist, but The Invisible Man pulls it off nicely.
Eitzel may still be the invisible man in many respects, but as long as he keeps translating his sorrow and suffering into batches of killer songs like this, we as listeners get to be the lucky beneficiaries. On the drunkenly jubilant closer, "Proclaim Your Joy," Eitzel exhorts us half-seriously that "it is important throughout your life to proclaim your joy." And with this album in your stereo, I think it's safe to say that you will.
