Eels – Electro-Shock Blues
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Eels – Electro-Shock Blues
Dreamworks 1998
Rating: 10/10
Electro-Shock Blues isn’t just a reaction. It’s a hundred shades of one reaction; a funky, playful album of horrible mirth at times, a completely hopeless document at others, an open stream of all the emotion one could have in the face of being left on your own. And finally, it’s life-affirming, an E beating up through the rubble of his life as if he’s learning some lesson and subtracting the bitter from the bittersweet. Because surely that’s why Electro Shock-Blues ends on the up. “P.S. You Rock My World” is the aftermath before itself, E’s words so bluntly honest: “I was thinking about how everyone was dying / and maybe it’s time to live.”
Sometimes I wonder that about E. His descriptors do him horrible service, painting him black and white in his never-ending sadness, as if every song is an “Electro-Shock Blues.” He’s more complex than that- hell, in the last number onElectro-Shock Blues his epiphany comes at a funeral service. At first I thought this was all a devastating black comedy, but now I realise it’s deeper than some ironic Indie pop record: it’s E’s honest smack of tough love, and he is his own recipient. On “Last Stop: This Town” he places himself in position with no compromise whatsoever, both with lament and celebration- “You’re dead / but the world keeps living.”
This song (and the album it belongs to, don’t forget) has soul. E pumps his fists, fires up his guitar riffs and screams his yeah yeahs, and, quite simply, lays it down like it is. What makes Electro-Shock Blues so honest it can be called a document, an accidental journal left around for curious eyes? Surely it is that E never flinches. He writes his tragedy from both sides and doesn’t shy away from measuring every millimetre of his mind; the lows and the highs come together, as the insanity comes with the joy on “My Descent Into Madness,” a pop highlight on the album that depicts E’s late sister and the reasons to root for her- “Come meet me at 8 o’clock tonight and you will see how I am not the crazy one.”
Electro-Shock Blues is held together like no other fragile thing is, its acoustic mopes, layered dance offs and electric rockers all landing on the same plane. Most would call this structure, and sure, this album has the beginning and end and the moments in-between, but ultimately the truth is what keeps E’s songs clutching to one another. Each one, to put it simply, is a reaction. A reaction to two deaths, to being the last remaining Everett and to wondering where the hell one goes from such a dark place. And every reaction leaves us humbled, but no perhaps more than the heart-stopping strings of “Dead of Winter”- “I will not fade into the night.”
Eels – “My Descent Into Madness”
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