With Strings, Live At Town Hall

The sad, strange songs of Eels feel sometimes like a plea for redemption to a world that no longer cares to listen.
Their records are marinaded not in slacker angst or off-the peg melancholy, but in something deeper, truer, bleaker.
Last year Mark Everett, the brittle musician at the heart of the group, turned down the volume on his rage. Going on the road as ‘Eels With Strings’, Everett no longer fumed against the world – he found for himself a comfortable corner in which to quietly sob.
For ‘With Strings’ (a tour captured truthfully, more or less, on the 20-track sprawl of Live At Town Hall) Everett appeared bent on contradiction, at once stripping down and expanding Eels’ sound.
Electric guitars were junked in favour of a black-clad foursome of string players; Everett’s drummer was asked to quietly stroke a set of bongos.
Aside from dressing head to toe in tweed and pacing the stage stamping an iron-shod walking stick, the singer seemed to conduct himself much as usual. He was, it appeared, making a point. What that point was exactly, only he may answer.
In the flesh, ‘With Strings’ felt both an indulgence for Everett and a gesture to fans. Few Eels standards featured; newcomers – or even those vaguely familiar with the canon – may have struggled to recognise where or how these hushed ditties had started life.
Live At Town Hall replicates the atmosphere of the shows and, in places, is quite lovely : ‘I Like Birds’ has a delicate sweetness absent from its studio parent; ‘Highway Man’ is a ghostly eulogy to an America that probably exists only in Everett’s imagination.
Those things that are absent – the physical presence of Everett, who can be at once absurd and magnetic, his bone-dry humour – are what perhaps made the shows so memorable.
Still, short of inviting Eels – and violins – to a hoe-down in your barn and taping the event for posterity, it’s hard to imagine a more definitive document of the band as a live force.