Album Review: Eels, Eels Time

Listening to Eels’ 15th studio album, partly recorded in Dublin, you can draw a line back to the electro-shock of their 1996 debut, Beautiful Freak, which I think I reviewed in these very pages. Certainly, the off-kilter rumble of ‘Goldy’, the alt-rock earworm of ‘If I’m Gonna Go Anywhere’ and the cranky ‘Lay With The Lambs’ feel like the kind of songs you’d expect the now 61-year-old Mark Oliver Everett to be writing.

Eels Time sees Everett waxing metaphorical about familiar themes. Dying alone has been a recurring worry, and it’s here again on ‘Lay With The Lambs’, E pondering the difference between his lot and that of his friends. The harder-edged ‘Goldy’, however, counters those fears, Everett insisting he’s OK on his own, confessing blithely that the only one he needs is the song’s titular goldfish.

He delves into grief on the delicate ‘We Won’t See Her Like Again’, drenched in the sounds and atmosphere of the ’60s, a similar tone to ‘And You Run’, which successfully juxtaposes emotionally raw lyrics with beautiful Byrds-ian melody. Relationships come under the microscope in both the deceptively simple ‘Song For You Know Who’ and the gorgeous ‘I Can’t Believe It’s True’, where he asks his partner, “What do you see in me that I don’t see in myself?”

For his first album as a sexagenarian, Everett sounds more content than he has in decades (his life has had more than its fair share of grief, as described brilliantly in his 2007 memoir, Things The Grandchildren Should Know), with the slowly soaring, brass-inflected ‘Let’s Be Lucky’ and the truly beautiful ‘If I’m Gonna Go Anywhere’ sounding positively, well, positive. “What else is there but love?” he asks in the latter.

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