Mark Eitzel

MUSIC

By Ben Sisario

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted May. 16, 2001

Mark Eitzel
The Invisible Man
MATADOR

It's been fascinating but repetitive to watch Mark Eitzel's career over the last decade, as he's gone from sad indie songwriter darling with a band (in the American Music Club), to sad indie songwriter darling with a major label solo contract and support from biggies like Peter Buck, to sad indie songwriter darling who's no longer on a major label and makes difficult, lo-fi bedroom masterpieces (like 1998's wonderfully deviant Caught in a Trap and I Can't Back out 'Cause I Love You Too Much, Baby). This has all happened during the ascendancy of the female singer/songwriter, when strong musical women claimed all the poetic self-righteousness their male counterparts used to wear on their sleeves, leaving guys like Eitzel, Freedy Johnston and Vic Chesnutt adrift and largely excluded from the mainstream. The Invisible Man, Eitzel's first since Caught in a Trap, is a clean, fairly commercial attempt to gain some notice. His usual jibes of mis- anthropic irony are abundant, like, "Goodness is not some pretty picture you paint/ It's shaking your fist into the face of danger" in "Sleep," or the tongue-in-cheek ridicule of religion as a tonic for boredom in "Christian Science Reading Room." Throughout, Eitzel has done little things to move back to the middle of the road, like adding a steady pulse of electronic beats whizzing in the background behind his usual bag of tricks like a deep, affectless morning-after voice and lazy acoustic guitar. The songs are solid, but the electronic doohickeys are distractions. B+