In the video for ‘Novocaine For The Soul’, the first single from Eels’ 1996 debut album Beautiful Freak, Mark Oliver Everett and his fellow Eels play their instruments while floating 50 metres in the air. Everett looks into camera like an extremely moody catwalk model, singing-grumbling lyrics like “Life is hard / And so am I,” and “Jesus and his lawyer / Are coming back.” Everett – or E as he is also referred to – was the best bespectacled hard man since Clark Kent, and he was funny and miserable like 80s Morrissey. Therefore, it was inevitable that Eels would be an instant hit in the UK.
And then things went very wrong. Everett’s sister took her own life, and his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Electro-Shock Blues, originally released in 1998, was catharsis. On ‘Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor’, Everett sings from the point of view of his sister. “My name’s Elizabeth / My life is shit and piss.” Track two, ‘Going To Your Funeral Part I’, doesn’t lyrically lift the mood – “A perfect day for perfect pain” – though the rest of the band appear to have joined in, and there’s a hint that everything is not all doom and gloom.
‘Cancer for the Cure’ provides immediate conclusive proof that Everett’s sense of humour is still intact. The first half a minute is a weird, skeletal, howling horror mash-up that should be an absolute mess but miraculously isn’t. It’s a full minute and 14 seconds before Everett turns up, and he sounds like he’s enjoyed the benefit of a good walk around the block. ‘Father knows best /About suicide and smack,’ he gleefully informs us, and the demented Doors-like organ on the chorus cements the absurdity of this trick we call life.
‘My Descent Into Madness’ has REM strings and Christmas bells, and sounds like a hybrid of Midnite Vultures Beck and Sea Change Beck. If only madness always sounded this gorgeous. As with ‘Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor’, ‘3 Speed’ is built around a strummed electric and cuts brutally to the point: “You think I got it all goin’ my way / Then why am I such a fucking mess?” The misery is at least slightly offset by some Springsteen-like precision (“Ridin’ down on Springhill / Meetin’ Alfred out in the woods”). ‘Hospital Food’ is warped jazz – think One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest mixed with La La Land.
On the album’s title track, Everett wills himself to stay alive – a simple, plodding piano melody conveys the effort he’s making to drag himself into the next day. The beautiful cello line on ‘Efil’s God’ is interwoven with sliced and reversed guitar à la ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. ‘Going To Your Funeral Part II’ is a short instrumental that begins as a Disney sunrise and morphs into a Thomas Newman Shawshank Redemption set-piece. On ‘Last Stop: This Town’, Everett mourns the fact that “you’re dead, but the world keeps spinning,” yet the track skips along in Smash Mouth style.
‘Baby Genius’ is a lullaby with radio crackling in the background, and ‘Climbing To The Moon’ could easily be mistaken for Iron and Wine. The acoustic-led ‘Ant Farm’ and ‘Dead of Winter’ precede the ice cream van melody of ‘The Medication Is Wearing Off’, and the album ends with the uplifting ‘P.S. You Rock My World’ – “And I was thinking ‘bout how / Everything is dying / And maybe it’s time to live.”
Heaven knows ‘E’ was miserable in 1998, but from his personal nightmare he wrenched an album full of humour, hope, and beauty. Life is hard, so an Eels re-issue will do very nicely, thank you very much.
