Zayn Malik, after an acrimonious departure, took the traditional ex-boybander route: getting the best R&B beats money can buy, escaping the band’s pent-up songwriting to relive his past couple years of getting very laid, and being rewarded with radio airplay.
Like many groups to come out of X Factor, One Direction were assembled from would-be solo artists despite their harmonies, scripted lad camaraderie, and terrifying sales numbers, the band was always a holding pattern until the boys could return to their solo careers. All they can do is try to articulate the feelings that recur in their cloudy moments of midnight reflection-their urge to push endlessly for enlightenment that never clarifies itself, to find a love that sticks, to find a way out of the eternal “runaround.” –Winston Cook-Wilson Eitzel never has firm enough answers to justify this royal treatment–most of the time, his anti-heroes are past thinking there are any. Throughout most of Hey Mr Ferryman, heavenly choirs or tremulous faux-strings overtake the slumped bar-band rhythm section to exalt his characters’ snide and indecisive pronouncements. Eitzel laughs at the grimmest moments: most notably, in the face of the boatman to the underworld on the album’s immediately indelible opener “The Last Ten Years.” Or the beatnik-ifed Scott Walker of the late ‘60s when he begins to tell a story (“An Angel’s Wing Brushed the Penny Slots”). It’s a perfect answer for your post-Leonard-Cohen blues, with a dollop of Greg Dulli sleaze in the husky vocal elocution, especially while he discusses the lapsed lovers whose “heart spill like wine” or just “grow cruel” on you. American Music Club leader Mark Eitzel’s latest elder-statesman-y solo album is docile and wise, in a beaten-down, gravelly cynical sort of way.