Album review: Eels

Published on Sunday 17 January 2010 21:00

EELS: END TIMES **** V2/CO-OP, £12.99

BY NOW, we know the deal with Eels mainman Mark "E" Everett, a musician whose chief preoccupations with mortality and misery lie at odds with the transcendent beauty of his music.

Unlike those whining emo kids, Everett really has been dealt a tough hand in life. When his father, the revered quantum physicist Hugh Everett III, died of a heart attack, it was the teenage Everett who discovered the body. Then, within two years in the late 1990s, his schizophrenic sister Elizabeth killed herself then his mother Nancy died of cancer. And then he lost a relative in the flight that crashed into the Pentagon during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Don't even mention his divorce in 2005… There's no need to anyway, as E has addressed it in the latest of a succession of wonderfully cathartic works.

He has already written an autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, explored his relationship (or lack of) with his distant father in the brilliant, heart-warming documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives and wrestled with the death of his mother and sister on the 1998 Eels album Electro-Shock Blues, the title of which hints at Everett's preferred coping mechanism – black humour. Even his most relentlessly bleak work is leavened somewhere with a dry wit, making it all the more bearable to behold.

Although the catalyst for End Times is the break-up of his marriage, E casts his net wider to contemplate not just the end of his own relationship, but what he describes as "the end of common decency", the breakdown of social relationships and even, at one point, the apocalypse itself.

But let's not jump the gun. There is a carefully ordered emotional trajectory to be followed here. Before retiring to his basement studio to lick his wounds on End Times, E indulged in a little reckless escapism by recording Hombre Lobo, a fun album about desire told from the viewpoint of a werewolf.

With that out of his system, he has embraced grim reality to produce this brutally honest divorce album. As an indicator of his state of mind, one track is simply a recording of rainfall. But End Times is far from dreich.

The Beginning serves as a sort of prologue. This hangdog country love ballad celebrates the special little intimate moments that fuel a relationship. But the lyric "in the beginning" tolls like a warning bell and, soon enough, we hear the upshot: "she used to love me, but it's over now" sings E, paraphrasing the Rolling Stones' It's All Over Now musically and lyrically on the garagey rhythm'n'blues number Gone Man.

In My Younger Days is a fine example of the beautiful sadness he is capable of producing. As E has noted sombrely "middle age is often old age in my family" and here he finds in his forties that he can no longer just chalk the split up to experience and look forward to the next relationship.

On the folky acoustic strum Mansions Of Los Feliz, he starts to wallow in what the characters from Friends would call the "sweatpants" phase of grieving your relationship, when you can't be bothered dressing and leaving the house. Next, he broods about where it all went wrong, chewing over an old argument on the piano ballad A Line In The Dirt before deciding to blame his loony partner on the garage thrash track Unhinged.

Things take a (more) morose turn on the title track, where he equates his world collapsing with the disintegration he sees in wider society. Looking at the world through gloom-tinted glasses, he expresses irritation at the smallest thing – a cat yowling outside his window – and finds that he can identify with the "crazy guy with the matted beard" proclaiming the end of the world.

Later still, you just know he has hit rock bottom when he breaks out a harmonica on Nowadays.

Finally, he tells it to the birds – literally – on Little Bird, boiling it all down to the simple fact that "goddam, I miss that girl". At last, the breakthrough he needs to bring the album to a cautiously optimistic close with On My Feet. This is Everett's answer to I Will Survive, though it is more acquiescent than defiant: "I'm sure I can take the hit."

The harmonica is tucked away for now and we can take encouragement from his earlier assurance that "now I'm a statistic, but I'm not fatalistic, I'm not yet resigned to fate, I'm not gonna be ruled by hate". Alert over.

E ponders the big depressing questions in this "mad mad mad mad mad mad world", not so we don't have to but so that we at least have an eloquent, emotional and empathetic soundtrack to turn to in our hour of need. Let's hope he gets as much out of the experience as his listeners.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

Treacherous Orchestra

Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, 23 January

GLASGOW'S 13-piece Treacherous Orchestra made their Celtic Connections debut last year, and look set to stand out from the crowd again.

This self-styled "acousto-thrash" big band comprise members of Croft No 5, Peatbog Faeries, Salsa Celtica, Session A9 and Old Blind Dogs – in other words, every Scottish folk ensemble to rock your socks off over the last decade. But never mind the pedigree, feel the energy...

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