It will come as no surprise to longtime Eels fans that the latest album by the band is all about loss. It's a subject that the band's front man, Mark Oliver Everett - or E - knows very well, and writes about even better. Relationships have ended before, of course, but this one hits harder, as E notes on In My Younger Days, because he's older this time round, there may not be many chances for love left and - quite frankly - "I don't need any more misery/To teach me what I should be". I doubt if anyone outside of John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Kurt Cobain can match E for capturing primal pain in song, and he even outdoes those three when nailing the mundane reality of a breakup. A Line in the Dirt begins with an abrupt image - "She locked herself in the bathroom again/So I am pissing in the yard" - but, this being E, only 15 seconds later we have left the urine-soaked yard and entered a chorus so staggeringly beautiful, you'd swear this must be a love song, not a death-of-love song. But no. Decode that sweet, fragile vocal and we find that he's singing: "I drew a line into the dirt/And dared her to step right across it/And she did." Still, E won't let himself - or us - wallow in misery; not when he can strap on his electric guitar, stomp on the fuzz pedal and rock out on Paradise Blues and Unhinged. Life goes on. One broken heart follows another; and, in E's case, another masterpiece emerges from the wreckage.
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