Eels
Blinking Lights And Other Revelations

THE REVIEW

There are times in life when everything seems to go wrong, where it's mostly your ideas and impressions working against you; but there are others, where truly everything goes in the opposite direction to how you'd like.
The hope is that for both moments, hidden somewhere, salvation, the turning point, that which in prose is known as the light at the end of the tunnel lurks. But the first is primarily a mental condition, the perception of when you feel that everything in life is proceeding “against” is nothing more than an unhealthy idea, it can certainly leave annoying residues, but most of the time you come out stronger and with an additional experience.
The second condition, however, is more painful because it overtakes real life, sweeps it away like a tsunami, and when it passes, nothing is ever the same again and it never can be, and this is real life, and it is the life described in this album.

More or less all of us have found ourselves living some days immersed in depression, in the deep reflection of mental unhappiness, and somehow, perhaps with the help of a friend, a book or a new love, we have come out of it. But it is the second case, the overwhelming one, that hurts us and many times changes us so much that it upends our life for all the days to come. Often I have found myself battling boredom and solitude, with that bit of bad luck that makes you cry, but ultimately helps you strengthen your small convictions. It's been days now that I've been living in the whys, whose answers take time to come, and in these gray days, it was chance that made me cross paths with this album, and since then it has obsessively accompanied my days, in the car, in the bookstore, at home or on the mac, wherever I am, it plays.
It was inevitable that getting so deeply under my skin would make me reflect for a long while on how often the author must have found himself living in the painful condition when everything, but absolutely everything, truly ruins you, destroying in a short time everything you have, know, and most importantly, are.

The conflicting relationship with a father who was as much a genius in physics as he was a lover of alcohol, the solitude and pain encountered in the death first of the mother from an unrelenting cancer and then of the sister who committed suicide, had already found expression in the themes of the previous “Electro-Shock Blues” (1998), but here they return with compelling evidence and with a new and surprisingly wonderful message of salvific future hope.
The greatness of this work, two CDs with 33 songs, lies in its being a comprehensive compendium of life, from the suffering of abandonment and death, to the faith in a hope of a way out of the pain, and that despite everything, tomorrow might still be worthy of being lived and perhaps even better.

“I wake up early in the morning/ no matter how disappointed I was the day before/ now it's all new”
(...) “I do some silly things/ but my heart is in the right place/ and this I know” (...) “I have a dog, I take him for a walk/ and everyone likes to say hello/ I've always been on the edge of the sidewalk/ I'm learning to say hello without too many troubles/ I'm growing just like my father/ although I swore not to/ now I can say I feel love for him” (…) “I feel like he’s with me now/ even though he's dead/ it's not all bad, nor all good!” (Things the grandchildren should know)
“I was not a son of a bitch/ dad was a drunk/ a very unpleasant person/ asleep on the floor/ right in the middle of the front door” (…) “Grandma cheated/ said the times were serene/ said I was not a son of a bitch/ kneeling on myself/ praying God please... ” (Son of a bitch)

It is thanks to the strength of phrases like these that I find the power to overcome all my petty weaknesses, when I feel that there are those in the world who still believe in life despite having had to face it so uphill.
Perhaps I should have talked about the music, the collaborations with Tom Waits and Peter Buck of REM, the rock ballads, the blues, the country or the pop, the poignant strings and the piano solos that can be heard in this album, or even its long gestation started in 1997 and only completed today; but when I grasped the depth of soul behind this work, a long conceptual suite made of love and hatred for life, all discussions on the music seemed to me of unnecessary vacuity.
Together with Elliott Smith’s “From A Basement On The Hill,” the paradigm of the artist who in one case succumbs and in the other overcomes the malaise of living.
For me a Masterpiece of art and life!