California still seems to me the unequivocal masterpiece in the American Music Club/Mark Eitzel canon: an opaque reflection on betrayal, isolation and love lost and rediscovered which defies the boundary of existence/non-existence by degrees daring by even 1988 (Spirit Of Eden/69) standards, and its long-term absence from circulation - caused by our old friend, Legal Issues - remains regrettable. Eitzel sometimes appears to defy happiness through crying on the soft, greying outwards sands of California - hear his collapse on the final "Jenny don't go" on the song "Jenny" - but "Last Harbor" signals either a last wave before slow drowning or the slower realisation of a gradual dawn.
He starts the song sounding as beaten as any male singer I can think of, over a bare background of mid-tempo mid-register acoustic guitar and discreet bass, meditating on the many faces of betrayal and false new starts: "Some of them are kind and it's phony/Some of them are kind...and it's OK..." but he's losing his spiritual grip. "Falling, falling," he falls before exclaiming in slow-motion horror, "Hey, I can't see the bottom!," his "bottom" bottoming out in the faint hope that it might act as parachute, before climbing to Art Garfunkel heights - tonally unsteady, but totally heartfelt - to ask "are you gonna be my last harbor?"
Then he laughs-cum-sobs the second verse, perhaps to mock, or more urgently to convince himself: "She'll soon find a way to make you feel fine/She's laughing and she's clapping her hands/As she walks across your cup of wine" - note the ambiguous Biblical reference - "She'll make it real easy for you," he sings with slightly more strength, before falling in a float through the distended syllables of "all you've got to do is remember her name" and landing on a stern "She's almost your passport to the world" followed by a slightly breathless and expectant "She's almost your ticket out...again!" as though he cannot quite believe in himself that she is the actual answer.
The chorus is sung once more, and then, after a pause to allow a presumed answer, he repeats the "are you gonna be...my...last...har...bor?" question more hoarsely, more vulnerably, more life-saving pleadingly descending in scale until that "bor" finds its buoy in a sudden, subtle Pacific Ocean horizon of distant synthesiser (thus underlining the parallel with Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue, especially "Thoughts Of You"). Eitzel reiterates the first two lines of the first verse while the synth implies but doesn't fanfare a resolving major chord, before quietly concluding: "Some of them never tell you/Just how much they'll give away," with which he merges with both sea and sky as guitar and bass fade into the middleground as the synth turns everything into a transcendent gasp of quiet wonder until it becomes a Whistler blur of beauty; not so much the last harbour before expiration but the patient rising of a new sun, and spiritually not that far away from the Spanish quays of AR Kane; swimming with strokes generous.
He starts the song sounding as beaten as any male singer I can think of, over a bare background of mid-tempo mid-register acoustic guitar and discreet bass, meditating on the many faces of betrayal and false new starts: "Some of them are kind and it's phony/Some of them are kind...and it's OK..." but he's losing his spiritual grip. "Falling, falling," he falls before exclaiming in slow-motion horror, "Hey, I can't see the bottom!," his "bottom" bottoming out in the faint hope that it might act as parachute, before climbing to Art Garfunkel heights - tonally unsteady, but totally heartfelt - to ask "are you gonna be my last harbor?"
Then he laughs-cum-sobs the second verse, perhaps to mock, or more urgently to convince himself: "She'll soon find a way to make you feel fine/She's laughing and she's clapping her hands/As she walks across your cup of wine" - note the ambiguous Biblical reference - "She'll make it real easy for you," he sings with slightly more strength, before falling in a float through the distended syllables of "all you've got to do is remember her name" and landing on a stern "She's almost your passport to the world" followed by a slightly breathless and expectant "She's almost your ticket out...again!" as though he cannot quite believe in himself that she is the actual answer.
The chorus is sung once more, and then, after a pause to allow a presumed answer, he repeats the "are you gonna be...my...last...har...bor?" question more hoarsely, more vulnerably, more life-saving pleadingly descending in scale until that "bor" finds its buoy in a sudden, subtle Pacific Ocean horizon of distant synthesiser (thus underlining the parallel with Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue, especially "Thoughts Of You"). Eitzel reiterates the first two lines of the first verse while the synth implies but doesn't fanfare a resolving major chord, before quietly concluding: "Some of them never tell you/Just how much they'll give away," with which he merges with both sea and sky as guitar and bass fade into the middleground as the synth turns everything into a transcendent gasp of quiet wonder until it becomes a Whistler blur of beauty; not so much the last harbour before expiration but the patient rising of a new sun, and spiritually not that far away from the Spanish quays of AR Kane; swimming with strokes generous.
