What other name could you give an album like this other than American Classic? It's an impossible question to answer. Nothing anchors its themes with the same level of depth and accuracy as these two words settling up to one and other like lonely strangers in a dimly lit bar, weighing their options after last call. Nicholas Merz has been all over this country, most recently as one-half of the Seattle-based and soberly romantic duo Darto- but it's with his solo efforts on American Classic that he manages to dig his spurs into the dirt long enough to pause and drink in the great, diminished expectations of the promised land on the other side of manifest destiny. On American Classic, Nicholas still sounds somber and stoic, but there is now a country-western quality to his singing that helps give his lyrical descriptions of the lives of the declassed, no class, godforsaken and god-fearing a sentimental hue and a pulse of warmth. Not to mention a twinge of Twainian irony. There is a little bit of Leonard Cohen in his delivery as well, but unlike the wry crooner, Nicholas is all-American, and all too close to his subjects. The way he describes someone who is cohabitating with a lover as if the two were playing a game of chess is conspicuously human while lending the listener the benefit of a clairvoyant instrument; allowing you to see through the subject's eyes, while Nicholas's words pierce the veil of appearances to show you the drama of contradictions that flounders beneath. One of the more amusing scenarios on the album appears on "Great Spiders" where a flight of self-love diverges from the mundane into an act of narcissistic negligence, and ultimately, man-slaughter, scored by the mocking drone of a swirl and pandemonium of saxophones. Empathy comes to overlap with a carrion-eater's voyeurism on the grudgingly visceral, rag-timey sweep of "Condor," and a drawn-out good-bye implodes into an existential crisis on "A Day in LA," a climax that is bound to a percussion line that sounds like someone beating a throw rug on a clothesline, a nagging, futile racket, presented as if the abuse of some lowly strip of decore could cause an epiphany to emerge that had otherwise eluded the narrator. On American Classic, Nicholas tells it like it is- even when what it is, is an intractable, self-destructive mess. But hey, ain't that America?
