Eels
Wonderful, Glorious

It must have been... I don't know... ten years ago when I discovered the Eels.

I was at my then singer's house, sitting there on the couch not knowing what record to put on, and she said to me, "I have a record that resembles you." I couldn't understand what she was referring to. Once "Novocaine For The Soul" started, I perfectly understood what she meant. To my being depressed, as if confined to a state of constant gray. That's how Mr. E was, and thus, I became infatuated with his way of tormenting his own and others' souls with his personal apocalypses, the breaches in the wall of his soul that let through a faint light of melancholic hope, a laconic and latent word in the Everettian language. And that light has finally exploded. I don't quite know how a person constantly living in a hell of brutalizing memories can emit such a quantity of brightness after a tortuous path that seemed only to lead downward. Even though signs were already evident in his creature's latest works. A creature that has put down more solid roots in Mr. E's musical whims. One morning, you wake up and discover that the window can be opened to let in the sun. Thus comes the moment of "Wonderful, Glorious," a record that shows its teeth, also because the beard has met the scissors, and the mouth can open wide to shout something that had previously been stuck in a corner of the throat. And besides the teeth, it also shows a good dose of muscle. 

Insidiously strong muscles, as in the opening track "Bombs Away," with its ritual voodoo percussion, compact yet sharp and direct guitars, and lyrics that warn of a new life ready to hurt anyone who gets in the way ("I've enough of being a mouse/I'll no longer keep my mouth shut"), with a class that only the old cat Waits can inspire. The path unfolds on the rock'n'roll fuzzammazza percussion of, precisely, "Kinda Fuzzy," with its Beck-like and snarky verse, with those toy-keyboards making you nod until your head spins in the chorus. The Godzilla fuzz continues to claim victims in the huge "Peach Blossom," the muscles shown above becoming ever more distorted, and here and there encountering openings of clean guitar and synth that temporarily unplug before returning to the fray by sticking fingers directly into the socket; an enormous and affected drum accompanies the invitation to open the window and look outside. But this is not just a work of sonic "greatness," and one discovers it in the velvet of the guitars and smoky voice of "The Turnaround," where the evening's melancholy descends on the (un)sorrowful notes and ends by opening up in a semi-voiced crescendo finale. And the blues overdose of "New Alphabet" seems to tell the Black Keys "learn the lesson properly because you've got a long way to go," with its pounding and driven cadence like an electric boulder pairing perfectly with the synth flights and arpeggios that infect the composition without diluting its compelling force. But the beauty of the Eels always reveals itself in the soft touch, and "True Original" proves, to my humble ears, to be the most successful and high piece of work, a sort of love song that betrays smoke and epicness, with Everett's lone electrical guitar caressing the idea of painting someone in shades of bright blue.

And so Mr. Everett distances himself from his hallucinatory sadness (ending by no longer resembling me as my singer said), we don't yet know for how long, we don't know if forever. Perhaps you won't cry out in (deadly) orgasm as you did after listening to "Electro-Shock Blues", but it is in change that the Eels have always thrived, and it is from this point that it seems they will take their move from now on. 

Until the next misfortune.