Eels
Blinking Lights & Other Revelations

THE REVIEW

It's always difficult to talk about albums like these, hyper-autobiographical, prolix, full of minimal instrumental interludes and, as in this case, double, encompassing a beautiful 33 tracks. A flood of emotions written with the usual quirky acoustic "nerditude" of the jack-of-all-trades E. (officially Mark Oliver Everett). The work is divided into two musically similar parts but sharply divided in content. The first disc is strongly autobiographical, and simply by observing the titles, one could get a glimpse of his past: "where I came from/a magic world/son of a bitch/the railway man/in the yard behind the church." E. bares his soul from the act of birth to the anxieties of maturity, passing through family, growing up, first loves, depression, goodbyes, and bereavements. We are faced with a true manifesto of skewed self-psychoanalysis, made up of many small portraits sometimes less successful and too minimal ("Checkout Blues"), as it is in this artist's nature, yet particularly convincing precisely in this first part, where above all shines the solemn ride of "The Other Shoe" and the initiatory positivity of "From Which I Came/A Magic World."

In the second disc, the fragmentariness remains constant while the themes addressed no longer look back but to the present, with a strong sense of detachment and widespread resignation, and here the album's title, "blinking lights and other revelations," confirms its true essence as a book full of textual and musical sketches. For the writer, a long-term recipe that is hard to digest given the many negligible moments of digression, with long voids offset by scattered gems and above all by a final pearl like "Things The Grandchildren Should Know," which alone is worth the effort of having reached the end of listening to the second disc.