Eels — Wonderful, Glorious
Not sure if anyone else has reviewed the new Eels album yet or not. If not, then FIRST. (That’s a link to the full thing over at FasterLouder.)
Over the course of their albums, E has written songs so intensely personal they make reading his autobiography seem redundant. If you’ve heard Electro-Shock Blues you know his sister committed suicide and his mother died of cancer one after the other, and if you’ve listened to Daisies of the Galaxy you know how he dealt with that and moved on. If you’ve listened to the entire Blinking Lights and Other Revelationsdouble album you know about everything from details of his birth to his relationship with his distant father, a brilliant physicist who invented the concept of alternate universes. There’s not much in the way of backstory left to reveal. Each new Eels album is just a way to check in on where E is at currently – is he still kind of mopey but fundamentally content in spite of that? Yep.
