Electro-shock Blues - Eels

The Eels debut album, Beautiful Freak, made them known(ish) on both sides of the Atlantic. The album was a mix of quirky tunes, such as ‘My Beloved Monster’ (on the Shrek soundtrack) and ‘Lucky Day In Hell’ (as used in Scream 2) and ‘Mental’. Mark Everett, more commonly known as ‘E’, could come up with some good stuff and drummer Butch and Tommy doing the bass made the Eels a good group to listen to if you wanted something alternative but not straying too far. Eels returned (minus Tommy) with their second, and bleakest album, in 1998. Songwriter E was having a turbulent personal life to say the least, his sister ...

Eels didn't appeal to me at all with their debut 'Beautiful Freak'. Ok 'Novocaine for the Soul' was amazing but everything else was fairly limp. Thankfully Electro-Shock Blues makes up for that albums failings. It is as fresh faced and mischievous as Denis the Menace but also a deep intelligence. Straight from the off there is a zany, almost hauntingly beautiful moment when 'Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor' effortlessly slips by. Followed by the curious 'Going to the Funeral' and all those stories about lead singer 'E' begin to make sense. Choosing subject material that any sane songwriter would avoid is certainly not ...

Electro-Shock Blues is the second album recorded by Eels, in 1998. The album is a strange but brilliant one for me, the songs are often a mix of tounge-in-cheek, sadness, happiness, looking on the bright side and sometimes all of those at once. This album is very reflective to E's negative life experiences, mainly dealing with the death's of his sister (suicide), mother (lung cancer) and father (heart attack), the first two incidents being fairly recent in terms of the album being recorded, the latter in the early eighties when Mr. E was nineteen years of age, he also discovered the deceased body of his father. This basically explains my ...