‘Electro-Shock Blues’ by Eels

There are melancholic albums, there are miserable albums, and there are very miserable albums. Then there’s ‘Electro-Shock Blues’.

In a sense, this should be no massive surprise. ‘Electro-Shock Blues’ was conceived and written as a response to Mark Everett’s sister’s suicide, and his mother’s death from lung cancer, so it was never going to be especially cheerful. Right from the word go, the listener is plunged into a sad and fragile world – ‘Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor’ and ‘Going To Your Funeral Part 1’ are as a bleak a way as you can imagine to open an album, and when an album’s most upbeat track is called ‘Cancer For The Cure’, you get a pretty good sense of what to expect from the rest of the record.

At the same time, the emotional intensity of this album remains surprising. His previous album, ‘Beautiful Freak’ had dark moments, but was commercially-orientated enough to supply three hit singles and win a Brit award, something which would have been unthinkable with this album. It would be fair to say, therefore, that this record set the path that E, and whatever forms Eels have taken since, have followed ever since. He has remained an individual – full of surprises, and never willing to make an album that just sounds like the last one.

There are glimmers of hope through the album – ‘Last Stop: This Town’ is all about death, but it’s sung with a smile, ‘Ant Farm’ is kind of sweet, in its own way, and ‘P.S. You Rock My World’ is some kind of attempt to finish on a note of optimism. Even in the bleaker moments, however, there are some wonderful moments on the album – ‘Efil’s God’ has a pleasant breeziness, and ‘Climbing To The Moon’ is a truly wonderful song.

So ‘Electro-Shock Blues’ isn’t for the faint hearted, and it wouldn’t work for all moods, but it’s a great record despite, and perhaps even because of those things.