#4. Eels – Electro-Shock Blues

“To me, it wasn’t a record about death. That was missing the point. It was about life,” Mark Oliver ‘E’ Everett

Electro-Shock Blues ought to be a miserable record. Its author, already demoralized by the “bullshit, record-selling-money-hungry world” introduced by the popularity of the debuting Beautiful Freak, lost his sister to suicide and faced becoming the only living member of his family when his mother was diagnosed with cancer shortly after. True, titles like ‘Going to your Funeral’ (Parts 1 & 2), ‘Elisabeth on the Bathroom Floor’ and ‘My Descent Into Madness’ do little to change any preconceptions. Yet, once fully digested, Eels second record is supremely hopeful. Powerfully so. Electro-Shock Blues is about realising death as a part of life and gaining the perspective to make life count as a result.

That’s not to suggest the album isn’t dressed in anything but the finest, funeral-befitting charcoal black suit – E celebrated his mother’s life in the altogether sunnier Daisies of the Galaxy two years later. The prettier shells here either reveal darker insides (Climbing to the Moon is elegantly strummed to “Got a sky that looks like heaven, got an earth that looks like shit”) or the majority-harsher moments, have, well, equally darker insides (the album open’s with “lying on the bathroom floor, kitty licks my face once more”). And while this is undoubtedly E’s album, the touch of The Dust Brothers’ Mike Simpson and fellow LA cut and paste producer Mickey P – whom E recorded with in between visits home to his ailing mother – is felt in the altogether unsmoothed edges.

In his memoir Things The Grandchildren Should Know, E described those trips from Virginia to the Echo Park suburb of LA to write and record as the greatest times of his life. “Maybe because everything else was the worst time of my life, the time spent trying to make something positive out of it all was my lifeline.” Electro-Shock Blues consequently is roughly divided into two parts – the first and predominant dedicated to his to sister Liz, to, in his words, give her the gift of being an artist with the latter songs concentrating on his mother’s fatal condition. Both are extremely touching, told in a very realistic manner. His sister’s depression is treated in a fittingly humane and honest way, oft times pitifully sad, particularly on the title track, and others heartbreakingly so (3 Speed). Hi s mother’s illness equally so, their complicated relationship distilled simply in mother/son terms on ‘Ant Farm’s “Hate a lot of things. But I love a few things. And you are one of them.”

But the more you listen, the more the record’s heart beats true. ‘Last Stop This Town’ is a cute, oddly catchy account of E’s neighbor seeing an apparition in his house that he assumes must have been Liz saying goodbye. ‘Dead of Winter’, for a minute and a half the saddest and bleakest song of the 16, ends as a wake up call for everyone still breathing. Two songs later, P.S. You Rock My World reaffirms this belief even more powerfully, ending a staggeringly candid record with unparalleled closing sentiment.

Laying in bed tonight I was thinking
And listening to all the dogs
And the sirens and the shots
And how a careful man tries
To dodge the bullets
While a happy man takes a walk

And maybe it’s time to live

And almost exactly a decade to the day later, no matter how shit things get, these final three minutes make everything ok.