Blog On The Motorway

Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with twitterthon hero Diary Of A Ledger, the idea being every week one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for. Then every three weeks we take a suggestion from someone else. This weeks suggestion comes from the lovely Jennie, who is more obsessed with Eels than is strictly healthy.

When Jennie suggested this album to me, she explained that it was her favourite Eels album because while it is the hardest of their albums to get into, it’s also the most rewarding to those who manage to do so.  I think that’s about a concise and accurate a review of this album as you can get, but I will try to elaborate.

Given that the album was largely a response from E to the suicide of his sister and the lung cancer of his mother, it’s hardly surprising that the lyrics of this album are dark, but what makes this album so special is the way that E conveys these emotions not through his vocal delivery, which is as laconic as ever, but through the tone of the music, and how the story unfolds throughout the album to show how one can come through these kinds of experiences.

There is something ever so slightly unsettling about the music on this album, especially in the first half, where childlike piano sounds wrestle for your attention with lazy guitars, discordant noise and thick treacly bass sounds.  It reminds me in places of a circus, albeit staffed by the clowns of Stephen King’s imagination.

Opener ‘Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor’ sees lyrics taken directly from his sister’s journal, and the gentle strumming is overtaken by haunting strings, and is moving to the extreme, the density of the sounds becoming claustrophobic. ‘Going to Your Funeral Part I’ sees a dirty bass riff giving way to a childlike piano sound and gentle ‘Shadows’ style guitar. It’s brilliant, and manages to evoke emotion better than a thousand Nick Cave songs.

Then comes the noise clash opening of ‘Cancer For The Cure’, which gives way to a darkly pop sensibility and lyrics that play with the notions of death raised in the earlier songs.  As the album moves on, however, the tone moves slowly away from the oppressive start and becomes lighter in tone, both lyrically and musically. ‘My Descent Into Madness’ is the first indication that this could be the same band who recorded ‘Novocaine for the Soul.’  ’3 Speed’ is almost Buddy Holly-esque, with a Brian Wilson influenced string section that is still slightly unsettling.

‘Hospital Food’ sees the album take an odd turn into Jazz horns and discordant rhythms wrapped around darkly comic lyrics and falsetto vocals.  The title track then wanders into Tricky style musical invention, as a simple piano sample underpins the drawling lyric. ‘Efil’s God’ then takes this further, the bass rumbling under simple hip-hop style drums and swirling backwards strings. ‘Going to Your Funeral Part II’ follows, a soft and lush instrumental which splits the album in two.

‘Last Stop: This Town’ returns to the anthemic sounds of the first album, although the lyrics are as sarcastically dark as before. ‘Baby Genius’ then crashes in, removing any semblance of ‘easy’ listening as the soft lullaby is interrupted by bursts or radio noise and crashing plates.  It’s a surreal tribute to his troubled genius father.

But it is the wonderful ‘Climbing To The Moon’ and ‘Dead of Winter’ that are the emotional and musical highlights of the album. Dealing in turn with his Sister’s and Mother’s deaths they drop the earlier sonic experimentation and are thundering in their emotional weight.  You get a real sense that by this stage of the album he is able to look at these two deaths logically, with the noise in his head clearing enough for him to start dealing with the loss, rather than the anger. The lyrics are breathtaking, and the music is simple and haunting.

The last two tracks, ‘The Medication Is Wearing Off’ and ‘P.S. You Rock My World’ start to show a more positive view, the former especially seeming like a breath of morning air.  The journey is complete as E sings on the final song that “maybe it’s time to live.”

Normally I wouldn’t go into such depths in reviewing an album, but every song here is a chapter in a story, each more integral than the last. It’s a brilliant, haunting and ultimately uplifting album that really shows what a great and talented artist E is.  I initially brushed this album off as one of my least favourite albums by them, but Jennie was right, the more you give this album the more it gives you back.

Don’t forget to go visit Gray and see what he thought.

5/5