Eels: End Times

The songwriter struggles to write when he’s happy, but when his world is falling down around him, he can, in the words of Roy “Catchphrase” Walker, pretty much say what he sees. Or so it seems for Eels mainman Mark Oliver Everett, aka E. By way of brief back story, everything you need to know about E’s eighth album is detailed on the opening line of Gone Man. “She used to love me but it’s over now,” he sings, over the hair-shirt boogie of a song that leaves you in no doubt as to who screwed up. All but one of the songs address the same subject. The Beginning is a hazy flashback to a relationship in its tingling infancy, all the better to measure the loneliness detailed elsewhere. E is no stranger to loss. In 1998, Electro-Shock Blues addressed the deaths of his parents and sister. Neither is End Times E’s first break-up album. The 1993 Broken Toy Shop album raked over similar ground — but, as the singer is quick, no ... achingly slow to point out on In My Younger Days, back then “I would’ve bounced right back, you know.” Here and, on Nowadays, guitars are played at the volume for an insomniac careful not to wake up the sleeping child next door. The sense of days blurring into nights and weeks blurring into months is captured at its starkest on End Times. “Crazy guy with a matted beard/Standing on the corner/Shouting, ‘End times are near’ ” goes E’s careworn croak, in a way that leaves you uncertain if he’s staring into the road or the mirror. For all that, the voice at the heart of these songs isn’t reporting from a place beyond hope. If that were the case, the best songs on End Times wouldn’t tug so insistently on the heartstrings. E’s attempts to understand his own plight — most affectingly on I Need A Mother and On My Feet — depict a soul intent on groping its way into the light. “I pushed my bed against the window today so there’d only be one side,” he sings on the latter. As long as he doesn’t leave the window open, you suspect that, in time, he’ll put this crisis behind him too.