2010 in Music - Eels – End Times – B+
When you’re an Eels fan, you need to take the good with the depressing and End Times is an album odd in the sense that at least when you start off the album with the sad but lovely “The Beginning”, you think, oh this is a downer album. Then you have “Gone Man” and if you focus on the beat, you think it got happy… but read the lyrics, they’re anything but, which leads right to “Into My Younger Days”, a classic sad Eels song with sad lyrics, but deep beneath the muck of woe, there seems to be some hope, and you start seeing light at the end of the tunnel, even if it is the minimum glimpse. It’s as if E. has found some type of catharsis through depression. “La Mansion of los Feliz” isn’t a happy number if you read it, but if you listen to it, it’s almost as if someone is witnessing the end of the world and they’re not only ok with it, but whistling while it all flushes down. In the end, I think the real message comes through in “A line in the dirt”. A relationship is on the brink, it’s about to end and it’s about that whole process one goes through as it all goes to crap and that whatever we say in those times and feel at the moment and years later, it’s all ok because those will just be the scars we’ll wear in the future. Then comes the quasi doo wop goodness of one of the higher points in the album “Paradise Blues”, where a call to drop the sarcasm and let the love in rings quite true. Simply put, whereas Blinking Lights and other revelations was a testament of the beauty of depression, there was no intension of getting out of the muck. It was the responsibility of the listener to learn from despair, but to stay in it. In End Times, there’s just a feeling as if that same sadness is there, but that it’s time to move on, and it’ll take 14 tracks to get you there. In between, you’ll also find a great new breakup song in “Unhinged” where the guy basically sleeps on the couch for months on end, is left with only a girl with crazy eyes who’s pretty much lost it. Then near the end, you hear the very pretty “Little Bird” and how the speaker is having a conversation with a little bird, hoping that everything will be ok and the last track, “On my feet” says that although everything is not alright, he’s still on his feet. Consider this one of the better getting-through-a-breakup albums ever written because the theme endures throughout.
Highlight Tracks: The Beginning, Gone Man, a line in the dirt, Paradise Blues, Unhinged, Little Bird, on my feet
