What We're Listening To

REVIEW
"God damn. I miss that girl."

Once again, Mark Oliver Everett is not available for children's parties.

The frontman of Eels has never really been a well of joy, but the down-notes sounded in his bleak history aren't those of a mascara-caked teen that's lost his candy cane. Eels don't pull a tantrum.

Eels are weatherbeaten, but resilient. They're desperate, but coated in black humour. They're dark, but with a raw, confessional beauty that suggests there's a light at the end of that pitch-black pipe.

End Times - the eighth studio album - is Everett's "divorce album", largely recorded on an old-four track in a Los Angeles basement. Many of these songs are stripped back to the ribcage, leaving Everett's incisive lyrics to float around in the foreground.

Electro-Shock Blues in 1998 dealt with the loss of family. This album is elbow-deep in lost love. In the mournful standout In My Younger Days, a man nursing a freshly-broken heart in his mid-forties drawls that "I don't need any more misery/To teach me what I should be".

Everett contemplates and kicks the cat, but wraps up with On My Feet, which muses that "I've been through worse/And I'm sure I can take the hit". And, with yet another bruise already darkening, Eels amble onwards.