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The Eels second album turns 25 years old and I’m ready to party, alone in the cold.
I was born in January and have always loved the cold months. It is a sacred rite every Fall to find the coming winter’s media, the books, movies, shows, and albums that will see you through the darker months.
Twenty five years ago Mark Oliver Everett, driving force behind The Eels, gave us one of the great long dark winter albums: Electroshock Blues. It is a concept album built around Everett’s loss of his sister to suicide and his mother to cancer. Themes of death, grief, and the after life are present in nearly every song. It describes various last moments, rushes of disjointed memory like a life flashing before your eyes, and realizations of life’s value. Some songs are jagged and angular with looped samples and squalls of feed back, other tracks are almost unnervingly gentle using woodwinds that could be from a vintage 70’s Sesame Street lullaby while singing about the minutiae of radiation therapy.
In the long tail of 90s culture Everett and his band have tended to get lost. Similar to how they were treated twenty-five years ago. He still records to a very high standard, having released an album as recently as 2022. In 1996 The Eels released their first album and greatest success with Beautiful Freak. The track Novacaine for the Soul became a late stage alt…