Electro-Shock Blues, by Eels
In 1996, Mark Oliver Everett’s sister committed suicide after years in a psychiatric ward battling schizophrenia. Everett’s father, a pioneer of quantum physics, had died years earlier when Everett was nineteen. And in the winter of 1998, Everett’s mother died of lung cancer, leaving Everett, popularly and henceforth referred to as “E,” as the only surviving member of his family. From here, E and his band recorded their second album: Electro-Shock Blues.
Electro-Shock Blues is not a reaction to tragedy, it’s sixteen reactions to tragedy, strung together unchronologically and disjointedly. People have attempted to assign the songs (fourth review on "positive") to the stages of the Kübler-Ross model of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), and there’s probably something to be said there. Electro-Shock Blues is not a For Emma, Forever Ago, or some other hyper-concentrated emotional outpouring—no it’s much more realistic than that. It’s bitter, it’s sarcastic, it’s jaded. E is not always composed, nor is he perpetually train-wrecked; he’s sliding back and forth across the spectrum, sometimes sounding as if he is gritting his teeth through pain and putting up a face of (cynical) self-control, sometimes sounding like he is utterly ripped to shreds. It’s the sound of someone coping, with varying degrees of success.
But the fact that Electro-Shock Blues is one of most rawly expressive albums I’ve ever heard is complicated by the fact that it’s not actually that good, which of course needs some explaining. I have difficulty describing Eels; I’ve seen them labelled as “indie pop,” which is woefully misleading, but I’m not exactly sure what to say about them myself. Others have pointed out they (or he, it’s really E and revolving company) use “hip-hop production,” which I’m not really qualified to agree or disagree with, and Wikipedia has them tagged as trip-hop. I would affectionately describe Eels as “ugly pop.” They’re gritty, occasionally almost nasty, and I honestly have no idea what makes someone want to make music like this. I have no idea what makes someone in an emotional crisis seeking expression pursue this. It’s not even that well-written; many times I can’t decide if the lyrics are plainly juvenile and meant for 90’s angsty teens or if they are the product of E's unwillingness to unnaturally elevate his language in the face of crisis, as if artificially magnifying his tragedy would somehow cheapen it. He uses little words, and little stories, stories that seem to mean nothing but surely mean everything. There’s no cutesy box to wrap Electro-Shock Blues in, just a disheveled, borderline-suicidal mess.
But still, it almost begs the question of whether or not someone can produce something devastating and emotional while not necessarily creating something good. Electro-Shock Blues is good certainly, but bizarrely not as good as its overall impact would suggest. I’ve seen people gravitate towards “Next Stop: This Town” and go so far as to say that it should have been one of the defining songs of the late 90s, which I don’t agree with because it’s way too obnoxious (honestly, thank goodness it didn’t get popular), but in the context of the album it sounds like E trying to regain some sense of over-the-top confidence and bravado, perhaps an attempt knowingly doomed from the start, but an attempt naturally made. The title track is quite simply the saddest song I’ve ever heard (especially in context), and so far away so that many songs I previously considered sad are trivial to me now. It’s so sad that it’s completely unrelatable; I have never felt sorrow as deep as E expresses it in this song. For the most part it’s four piano keys, crackling with each strike, pulsing like a heartbeat until it dies out after only two and a half minutes.
There is no commentary to be found on Electro-Shock Blues, no wisdom, scarcely a lesson to be learned. It is merely a documentary on E’s mental states through 1998, him simply saying how he feels with no polish or pretense. Perhaps it’s his diary even, as he reads us his sister’s in album opener “Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor”:
Laying on the bathroom floor
Kitty licks my cheek once more
And I
I could try
But waking up is harder when you want to die
Walter's on the telephone
Tell him I am not at home
Cause I
Think that I
Am going to a place where I'm always high
My name is Elizabeth
My life is shit and piss
Thankfully, E’s end was not his sister’s, and Electro-Shock Blues even treats us to an optimistic ending with E proclaiming in the strings-laden (but not quite “beautiful,” probably by intention) closer “P.S. You Rock My World”:
I was at a funeral the day I realized
I wanted to spend my life with you
Sitting down on the steps at the old post office
The flag was flying at half mast
And I was thinking about how everyone is dying
And maybe it is time to live
I don't know where we're going
I don't know what we'll do
Walked in to the Thrif-tee
Saw the man with the hollow eyes
Who didn't give me all my change
But it didn't bother me this time
‘Cause I know I've only got this moment
And it’s good
I went to the gas station
Old woman honked her horn
Waiting for me to fix her car
I don't know where we're going
I don't know what we'll do
Laying in bed tonight I was thinking
And listening to all the dogs and the sirens and the shots
And how a careful man tries
To dodge the bullets
While a happy man takes a walk
And maybe it is time to live
But this wasn’t the guaranteed conclusion to E’s story. Honestly it’s a miracle he survived this time, as it sounds as if he was one bad day away from being another “tragic musician.” But he did, and continues to put out albums, none of which I’ve heard and none of which I’m particularly interested in for some reason. I can’t see them comparing to the perfect ugliness of this record, the brutal sarcasm, that bitter wit. Perhaps the worst masterpiece I’ve ever heard, but strangely a masterpiece indeed.