Description
So much of Mark Eitzel’s music exists in spite of itself. Sung in a husky register between a whisper and a croon, his songs are filled with characters willing themselves to disappear, transmitting from a translucent state between existence and nothingness.Hey Mr Ferryman is Eitzel’s heaviest album, but it’s also, in a peculiar way, his sweetest—like Phil Spector orchestrating a George Saunders story.
“If that was death, it’s not so bad,” Eitzel sings in “An Angel’s Wing Brushed the Penny Slot,” from the perspective of a dead woman haunting her gambling-addict widow. Visiting him in the hotel where she died, she leaves him with a pithy message: “The El Cortez still welcomes me/Guess if you die on their floor, the drinks are all free.” After all, Eitzel implies, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel is just another way to look on the bright side
