Forgive me for recycling press releases, but there’s an interesting line in this one which accompanies the new album by American Music Club. “Dark music is for people who are healthy enough to take it,” it reads, “And AMC want to appeal to all people – including the sick.” Which reminds me of a fairly healthy unhealthy reputation I had in the early years of being a music journalist, when I purportedly only liked miserable music, because I wrote so much about AMC and their spectacularly doleful San Francisco contemporaries, the Red House Painters. AMC’s regular trick, you may recall, was to establish a gentle musical backdrop, over which Mark Eitzel could spill his guts. Many’s the night I spent watching him have what amounted to miniature nervous breakdowns onstage: I was reminiscing a few minutes ago about a particularly harrowing solo show at the black hole of Camden, the Falcon, which left the audience in as shattered an emotional state as the man himself. I loved it. Eitzel doesn’t seem to put himself through the wringer vocally quite so much these days, but a lot remains the same about his music. The point of that quote above is that “The Golden Age”, their very engaging new album, is allegedly a throwback to the mellow, baked soft-rock of the early ‘70s. I can see that to a degree, but really, “The Golden Age” sounds a hell of a lot like some of those early AMC albums, specifically 1988’s “California”, I think – though I must admit it’s been a while since I played those records. But unlike their last comeback– 2004’s disappointing Lovesongs For Patriots – The Golden Age is barely an American Music Club album, going on the personnel: only Eitzel and the indescribably subtle guitarist Vudi remain from the old line-up. You’d never know, though: the melodies remain sketchy and impressionistic, taking, as Allan (another big old fan) mentioned the other day, a lot of plays to insinuate themselves. Eitzel doesn’t choke on the words quite so often any more, but age does not seem to have brought him much closer to happiness. I haven’t played this at home yet, so I haven’t really had the opportunity to listen to the words properly. Nevertheless, things still spring out in the office that could have come from any AMC or Eitzel solo record of the last 20 years. The first line on the record, opening “All My Love”, runs “I wish that we were always high. . .” “The Decibels And The Little Pills” has a lightly-delivered chorus of “No-one here is gonna save me”. Track six is called “All The Lost Souls Welcome You To San Francisco”, which is surely so predictable a title and subject for Eitzel that he must be – with the usual tortuous self-deprecation, I’m sure – aware of the risk of self-parody. The thing is, it all falls together beautifully: I can’t remember enjoying an Eitzel-related album so much since maybe 1993’s “Mercury”. Give it the requisite time, and memorable songs materialise out of the exquisite atmospheres here – “The Dance”, “I Know That’s Not Really You”, the aforementioned “Lost Souls. . .”, a quite brilliant one called “The Stars” which reminds me of what a powerful, original guitarist Vudi can be at his best, shaping a lovely, looming ambience which underscores Eitzel’s fragile tales far more effectively than any other musical backdrop the singer used in their years apart. This one’s not out 'til February, so plenty more time for me to live with it and get to the bottom of what Eitzel is writing about. Maybe I’ll come back to this one nearer Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago or so, I used the online appearance of a new Wu-Tang Clan tune to complain – from a dilettante-ish position, I admit – that 2007 has been a thin year for hip-hop. It now looks like the Wu album may have been put on hold for a while, though apparently there is the substantial compensation of a new Ghostface Killah album instead. Today’s post, though, brought “American Gangster”, the new album from Jay-Z, a rapper who I’ve been fairly obsessed with in the past. It’d be overstating things a bit to make out that “American Gangster” is a bona fide classic to rank alongside “The Blueprint”, “Life And Times Of S. Carter”, “Reasonable Doubt” et al. But after a couple of listens, it seems like his recent pattern of ropey album followed by a good one has been continued. So while last year’s comeback “Kingdom Come” (after a brief, Sinatra-esque retirement) was a windy and forgettable cruise through some familiar Jay-Z tropes, “American Gangster” is a much tighter and more compelling trip through, well, much the same sort of territory I suppose. You’ll have to forgive me for not having analysed the lyrics in depth yet, but I’m struggling to see the grand conceptual arc that the album purportedly shares with the new Ridley Scott mob pic of the same name. It does, though, allow Jay-Z to wheel out his usual extended riffs on hustling, business and the connections between them, while not getting his hands too dirty. He doesn’t get too bogged down either this time with all the “I’m back” showboating which made great chunks of “Kingdom Come” so interminable. It’d be a bit dumb to expect humility from a Jay-Z album: to enjoy this stuff, you have to go along with the imperial boasting, and accept that Jay-Z’s wordplay and general deftness with a cliché elevates him far above most of his contemporaries. Even a fan, though, can get weary of it when, as on “Kingdom Come”, the posturing sounds so half-hearted. On “American Gangster”, in contrast, he sounds spry, serious and fully engaged. There are elements here which suggest a plush, executive-class upgrade of Jay-Z’s early New York sound, not least the presence of Diddy (y’know, Puff Daddy) and some footsoldiers from his Hitmen team as producers on nearly half of the album. They’re cocksure enough to build “American Dreamin’” out of a hefty chunk of Marvin Gaye’s “Soon I’ll Be Loving You Again”, while the fantastic “Roc Boys (And The Winner Is)” rides some triumphant horn voluntaries and features, if you listen closely, some distant backing vocals from Beyonce and Kanye West. Kanye doesn’t produce anything this time round, though the other key architect behind late-period Jay-Z triumphs, Just Blaze, is on hand for the Curtis Mayfield-riding title track. In general, I prefer Jay-Z records these days when he rides old soul breaks rather than crisp electro minimalism (those days of “I Just Wanna Love You” and “Big Pimpin’” seem a long way away now). That said, The Neptunes turn in a couple of tracks, “I Know” and “Blue Magic”, which, while not up to the standards of their Clipse productions from 2006 (“Blue Magic” is in that vein, actually), are still satisfyingly edgier than most of the schmaltz they’ve put out in the last couple of years. I’m onto the third listen now, and my judgment of “American Gangster” is definitely on the up. Some great things here coming hard into focus: as I write, the exceptionally lush grandstanding of “Say Hello”; the exceptionally lush grandstanding of “Ignorant Shit” – you get the picture. And I guess I’m grasping the more satisfying conceptual parallels between the American Gangster movie and this album: not just as an excuse for Jay-Z, respected and imposingly successful orthodox businessman, to play at being a crook again. But to reassert the ties between Jay-Z’s art and the culture of gangster movies, so that in “Ignorant Shit” he points out, “Scarface the movie did more than Scarface the rapper to me”, and to justify all those luxuriant ‘70s soul samples as not just great aesthetic backdrops, but as crucial historical contextualising. Because while Jay-Z has never really gone down the acting road like so many other rappers, “American Gangster” is not street verite, it’s great American theatre. At the end of “Ignorant Shit”, after nearly four minutes of bad boy posturing that seems to steer (not least thanks to the title) into gleeful self-parody, he cackles, “It’s only entertainment”. And boy, it is.