Last Saturday evening in the Temple Bar Music Centre was a male-dominated gathering of downbeat people, bereft of love and losers in the lottery of life. That's the theory, anyway, which in truth was mostly misplaced. There was, however, a thread of the kind of melancholy that turns up at Divorcees Only evenings, an unspoken but palpable bonding.
Brian (aka Ken Sweeney, with backing musicians Don Ryan and Conor Brady) highlighted a talent for the low-key but crucially important aspect of inspecting facets of love not under a microscope but beneath the glow of a flickering fluorescent kitchen lamp at 4 a.m. It might not have been his ideal gig, but Ken Sweeney gently triumphed amid broken guitar strings and singing songs he admitted to disliking.
Mark Eitzel is the founding member of the Generation X Lonely Guys Club. Previously the lead singer and songwriter of American Music Club, a superb band that exalted the intensity of loss and longing to a degree that it made Leonard Cohen look like a member of Buck's Fizz, Eitzel is the same, only different.
In a live setting you would think Eitzel's verbose, passionate material would make for a drab evening's entertainment. You'd be wrong, though - the man and his songs are a revelation.
Corkscrewing his guitar into the air to make a point, Eitzel sings of porn stars, drag queens and, bizarrely, or not, if you're a Mark Eitzel fan, Johnny Mathis's feet. He wrings out bitterness and emotionally twisted logic at the flick of his wrist, his between-song patter a mixture of surreal comedy and smart, self-deprecating awareness.
The end result was an enthralling and compelling gig, and yet another reminder that the intrinsic power of a person, a guitar and a handful of great songs thrashes empty and meaningless rock gestures every time.
