ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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Eels
MEET THE EELS and USELESS TRINKETS GEFFEN RECORDS 21.1.08 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk If you can be cited by George W Bush as obscenity aimed at children (like all pop music is aimed at kids!), attract Tom Waits as a guest on your album, supply soundtrack songs to How The Grinch Stole Christmas and cover Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On, then you have truly made it in the pantheon of alt-rock. In the dozen years that Eels have been around, Mark Oliver Everett, often known as E, and the focus of the band, has produced a string of beautiful, puzzling, sad, ugly albums that have passed much of the world by. Those that count themselves as fans are pure addicts of the bootleg-hoarding type. I’m someone who let Eels pass by. Recognising the first album’s Susan’s House (hey, everyone knows that one) and Novocaine For The Soul, somehow most of the rest of their output drifted past me. Now I find out what I was missing out on and wonder at my tunnel vision. The back-catalogue is packed with little sparkly things. The Essential Eels album manages 24 songs in 80 minutes – that’s three-minute songs with no waste fat hanging on them. Trim little puppies. There are loads of standouts – My Beloved Monster, I Like Birds, Mr E’s Berautiful Blues, It’s a Motherf&*%er, Souljacker Pt1, Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living). If Eels passed you by, go and try one of these and see what I mean. So, there is an awful lot of product here. The twenty-four track ‘best of’, a thirty minute live DVD and two packed CDs of b-sides, outtakes and remixes. There’s a DVD of music videos too, that we haven’t seen but, we’d have struggled for time to study any more Eels, it’s already been like an Eels festival round here and we feel like Henry the First who died of a ‘surfeit of lampreys’ (an eel-like creature). Meet The Eels - Essential Eels is mixed and consistent at the same time, having different production values but a solid sense of song and style. Hey Man hymns the joy in pain as well as love – the fun in just living. There are a nice set of sleeve notes, reminding us that Mark’s Dad invented the Many Worlds theory in physics, just as Mark lives in many worlds of song. I prefer the less polished Useless Trinkets – fifty bits and bobs. It’s true that few people will want three versions of My Beloved Monster but much of the ecleticism pays off. Most of the Essentials album is here but in live versions and demos, which I prefer. Who’da thunk it; Eels are a great live band. Things become rawer and simpler with less window dressing production. Some songs are revealed as ‘borrowing’ off others - Altar Boy is a Laughing Lenny Cohen rip-off and Souljacker Pt 1 is a ‘tribute’ to The Doors, while After The Operation appropriates Lou Reed’s chords from Last Great American Whale. Legitimate cover versions are a highlight of live shows and this compilation – Prince’s If I Was Your Girlfriend shows its face and I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man features later. I Put A Spell on You would have been a great encore piece. Of the originals, Novocaine For The Soul has some great slide blues. Dog’s Life is sweet, a reworking of Susan’s House (Susan’s Apartment) is a funky lo-fi shambles and Vice President Fruitley is a very silly laugh. I Like Birds is mad frenetic punk and has a great sense of humour. The BBC sessions are nicely ragged round the edges. Clattery drumming, distorted instruments, rinky-tink organs and other scrap heap sounds are the order of the day. Mark moves between growls, gruffness, crooning and stattacco delivery. There are a number of Beck-like moments, partly through the wilful ecleticism, partly in the determination to stay off the wall whilst grounded in songwriting art. For me, the revelation was the live DVD (from Lollapallooza). It is busy madness as E, in goggles and flying hat, hammers his guitar and throws hoarse vocals into a distortion-overloaded microphone. A hard-hatted drummer pounds behind. A geezer in a shirt marked ‘Security’ shadow boxes on stage left and makes cryptic announcements from his mutton chop whiskers. Later he is dispatched to squirt cream into the mouths of an excitable audience…. There are a mere half a dozen songs. My Beloved Monster (again!) is a rave-up on fairground organ. A Magic World is delightfully simple and crudely fuzzed. I like the live simplicities and I like it even better when they take Not Ready Yet out for a ride. It gets a lengthy and surprisingly slow-handed guitar jam work-up and space to breathe that is raw and electric. When E takes a three minute song out to ten minutes plus, it is good to hear him make something substantial of it. So, there you have it, a huge collection. One to dip into at random and see what you find. You might be surprised. www.eelstheband.com |