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Monobrow'd, vodka-breath'd, woe-and-the-hell-below drunken-crooner-du-jour Mark Eitzel is known to all and sundry as being — musically — almighty grumpy, on par with peer Mark Kozelek as the guy at the end of the bar who you'd hate to be stuck next to if he was just wailing into his drink. But wailing behind a guitar, steering a sad tune down a slow and dusty path of lolling lamentation, he makes perfect company for late-night listening in the lost hours of the idle night. After two light-jazz longplayers in '95/'96 (one made in co-op with Peter Buck) for the Warner empire, in 1998 Eitzel scratched out new territories of dingy bleakness and maudlin melancholy on the stoically beautiful Caught in A Trap and I Can't Back Out 'Cause I Love You Too Much, Baby, a Matador-issued album that featured appearances from Steve Shelley, James McNew, and Kid Congo Powers, but found its best moments when it was just Eitzel alone with his guitar. There are a few such lonesome-balladeer turns on The Invisible Man, a long longplayer after a long lay-off that finds Eitzel returning with a band-like sound, meaning that he's oft joined by plenty of others, or, at worst, plays all the instruments himself. While the sound is often thick — layers of dewy guitars, keyboards, old organs, bass, drums/beats — it's always concerned with the "space" of the piece, such thickness often casting insular environments in which Eitzel's voice can wander lonely. Occasionally, the sound can take over too much from the vocal, like on Steve I Always Knew, when the song's narrative lyrics are overwhelmed by skittering beats and baroque flushes of synthesized sitar.
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