Electro-Shock Blues

Electro-Shock Blues is a wonderful album from The Eels. I'm not going to look up all the information about it because that's not really relevant and if you want to know, wikipedia is only a click away, I should think.

If you do decide to listen to it, keep in mind that it is a rather depressing, though ultimately refreshing (I can't come up with the right word at the moment), look at suicide, among other things.

The album opens with the short and somewhat cryptic "Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor," which really only made sense to me after having heard the album all the way through. The album starts off, thus, interestingly, as it introduces what is the central narrative obliquely and through the eyes of the object of the main narrator's emotions. Keep in mind that if you listen to that YouTube link (I'm not sure if it will work outside Japan), there are no beeping sounds on the original track.

"Going to Your Funeral Part 1," is on first listen rather hard to listen to. E uses two different styles, one of which is fairly dissonant to highlight different emotions, which I think is fairly obvious. It gets better on repeated listens.

Oddly enough, "Cancer for the Cure" and "My Descent into Madness" are actually relatively light-hearted tracks and provide a much needed break from the main narrative while staying fairly consistent with the overall feel of the album. "Cancer.." in particular shows E's ability to arrange for instruments outside of the typical guitar/drum/base setup an appropriately dark sense of humor. "My Descent..." is just pretty in that Eels way.

"3 Speed" seems to be a song set at a particular point in time without being clear. It just seems to be right at dusk to me. It contains the wonderfully blunt lines "Life is funny, but not ha ha funny/Peculiar, I guess."

"Hosptial Food" again breaks from the theme with more dark humor and is just great. "Electro-Shock Blues" returns to the mourning and confusion. It's probably not a track for everyone, with it's very minimalist sound. "Efils' God" is a strange mostly instrumental track. I don't have that much to say about it other than I don't know what is going on with it but it fits nicely.

"Going to Your Funeral Part 2" is really where the album raps up, in a way, though not where it ends, so I suppose E had a bit more to say. It's instrumental, which would sort of be a fitting way to end it. But it leads to an even better track, "Last Stop, This Town." It's pure pretty pop, with E's flat delivery fitting perfectly over the moving music. The lyrics are astoundingly good in that they meld with the music and are fittingly simple and blunt but exactly what is called for in the context. The lines "What if I was not your only friend in this world/Would you take me where you're going if you're never coming back" are probably the best example. Listen for them.

There are still six more tracks to cover, but I've got more to do than that, so I'll let you get to those on your own time.