SOUL TESTERS : Honest, Serious and Passionate, American Music Club Isn’t for Lightweights

American Music Club stands in roughly the same relation to the pop mainstream as a Bergman film does to your typical hit-minded Hollywood assemblage of car wrecks and shoot-’em-ups.

The band from San Francisco may not make much sense to fans who want a noisy, easily consumable evening’s entertainment. But if you’re seeking music that will draw you in and hold you with the force of its honesty, seriousness and passion, and perhaps even singe you with its emotional heat, that’s what AMC’s singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel is about.

Like Bergman, Eitzel has a way of tunneling through the darker, soul-testing side of experience. But you’re more likely to get a comic moment or a happy ending from Bergman.

In pop circles, Eitzel is kin to such singer-songwriters as John Cale, Richard Thompson and Leonard Cohen, all of whom have been willing to enter the cave of deepest hurt and to describe what they see and feel in unvarnished terms.

But Elvis Costello is the singer whom Eitzel, who was born in 1959, most closely resembles. Both have low, chesty, nasal voices that strain against their physical boundaries, making up in intensity what they may lack in natural gifts, and therefore achieving an expressive range that you’d normally associate with a saloon singer in the Sinatra tradition, or a honky-tonk son of Merle Haggard.

The band, founded in 1982 by Eitzel and a guitarist who goes by the single name Vudi, has spent most of its existence deep in the underground. Between 1985 and 1990, it issued four albums, one on a British label. In 1991, the message began to break through more widely: AMC’s “Everclear” was chosen one of the top five albums of the year in a Rolling Stone critics poll, and Eitzel was named the critics’ favorite songwriter. With the newly released “Mercury,” American Music Club moved up to a major label, Reprise.

With help from Mitchell Froom, the producer who last year framed new, adventurous and grabbing sonic concepts for Los Lobos and Suzanne Vega, AMC has turned out an album of evocative, darkly pictorial music in which gauzy keyboard hazes, distorted-guitar maelstroms and lonesome steel-guitar atmospherics all figure.

On “Everclear,” Eitzel was able to muster a sense of affirmation in such songs as “Ex-Girlfriend,” in which he offered comfort to a man thrown into depression by a romantic breakup, and “Rise,” which insisted with its surging refrain that “anything can rise.” “Crabwalk” chugged along with the sort of boozy, honky-tonk-influenced blend of comedy and desperation that you encounter often in the Mekons, or on Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” In “Royal Cafe,” Eitzel imagined himself escaping from deadened circumstances with another tramp-like-him--recasting Springsteen’s “Born to Run” myth, except with the greatly diminished expectations of someone too experienced to entertain such wildly romantic dreams.

“Mercury” offers no such warming fellowship. Eitzel seems so wounded and isolated that he declares, by the end, “All I want out of life is to hide somewhere.” There follows a plaintive question--”Will you find me?”--but the plea is less an expression of real hope than of the inability to let go of hope.

What makes the album poignant, rather than merely depressing, is that Eitzel still holds a fleeting, receding vision of a better life in which comfort and connection are real possibilities. Some younger, much louder and far more successful rock bands perhaps are not yet experienced enough to realize that this sort of vision--a paradise lost--is far more gut-wrenching than a vision that is purely hellish.

Feeling down doesn’t stop Eitzel from letting his imagination out to play. The sardonically titled “Challenger” (as in space shuttle) comes off like a curdled version of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.” That song, written in the ‘60s, depicted a magical if spooky flight into the mystic with a potential for revelations and wonders.

In “Challenger,” amid nasty guitars that seem to parody the Byrds’ famously spacey explorations, Eitzel portrays himself getting drunkenly morose on a flight to Detroit, during which he concludes: “My throttle’s open wide, and I’m wasting my life, and I’m wasting time.”

In “Johnny Mathis’ Feet,” the songwriter imagines himself turning to the smooth romantic crooner for advice on how to survive in the entertainment world.

“He said, ‘A real showman knows how to disappear in the spotlight,’ ” Eitzel wails, not with contempt for Mathis’ brand of performance so much as anguished recognition that it’s advice he’ll never be able to follow. Disappearing and becoming somebody different, a persona more poised, glamorous, likable and wise than you really are, is the showman’s way. Eitzel’s honest, revelatory method permits no such artifice, no such easy escape--for him or for his audience.