He’s a funny chap, E from Eels. He spends ages making ‘Blinking Lights and Other Revelations’, an intricate double album full of beauty, then he puts out an album which sounds like it was written and recorded over the course of a weekend before following it up with another two albums inside a year.
When this album was announced, I had low expectations. It was promoted as a sequel to ‘Souljacker’, my least favourite Eels album by a long way, so I imagined this would be a fairly heavy, indeed oppressive album of angry indie. In actual fact, it’s a true gem – light, delicate, and a real pleasure to hear. I said a minute ago that it sounded like an album made very fast – somehow, this adds to its qualities rather than distracting from it.
‘Prizefighter’ begins the album with an infectiously catchy foot-stomping two-chord romp. ‘That Look You Gave That Guy’ continues with a fragile composition overlaid with the most minimal overdubs possible. The next few tracks swing between these two points without putting a foot wrong along the way. Only right in the middle of the album does the content become a little more dense – ‘The Longing’ is one of those incredibly bleak solo performances that E does so well, and ‘Fresh Blood’ is a lurking beast of a song, and the most obvious link to ‘Souljacker’. It works better in isolation than it would have done stretched across the album as a whole. The second half of the album contains a run of songs that would have sat happily on ‘Blinking Lights’ – whether they were left-overs or written for the task, I don’t know, and I couldn’t care less. Either way, they deserve to be heard. Genuinely, the only downside to this album is how quickly it was followed up: ‘End Times’ and ‘Tomorrow Morning’ both came so fast, it would be easy to overlook this album entirely. Easy, but a foolish mistake.
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