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COAST TO COAST:
New York Times
Life is cruel, and then you die. Maybe someone will love you for a while;
maybe you'll mourn someone. That's the gist of the songs that E (formerly
Mark Oliver Everett) writes for his band, Eels, and the music doesn't soften
the bad news.
The songs are chiseled down to a plain-strummed chord or two, an old blues
riff or a few notes plunked on a distorted Wurlitzer electric piano. E sings
in a husky voice that hovers around his melodies like an acrid puff of smoke.
"Am I gonna be all right?" he sang at Irving Plaza last Saturday night.
"No, I'm not gonna be all right.
E's rigorous musical economy gives him a lot in common with P. J. Harvey,
though he doesn't attempt her vocal drama. Eels's new album, "Souljacker"
(DreamWorks), was produced by Ms. Harvey's collaborator John Parish and E,
and the touring band includes another Harvey sideman, Joe Gore, on guitar.
Where Eels's albums often enforce a bitter calm on the songs, the music
turned volatile onstage, opening up to glowering crescendos or getting seared
by one of Mr. Gore's guitar lines.
"Souljacker Part 1," carried by steady maracas and an implacable three-note
riff, paused for an extended stretch of feedback that was like a murderous
stare, with Mr. Gore holding his guitar upside down and Butch on drums
quietly keeping a beat. "Woman Driving, Man Sleeping" was as eerily serene
as the endless highway it depicted; "Not Ready Yet," about an encompassing
fear of the outside world, jumped from squealing peaks to desolate quietude.
Even Missy Elliott's lusty "Get Ur Freak On" turned grimly obsessive in the
Eels version.
E played his most alienated songs during the main set; for encores, he turned
to grudgingly hopeful love songs. For a final group of encores, he turned
sardonic, singing and joking about his role in show business. But he couldn't
take back the bleak clarity of the preceding set.
Los Angeles Times
If you think of pop songs as recipes, some songwriters do all the work for
us. There's nothing left to do except add water and stir. Many of music's
most valuable writers, however, invite listeners to be active participants in
the creative process.
Eels leader Mark Oliver Everett, who led his band in concert Sunday at the El
Rey Theatre, fits in the latter group. Like such kindred spirits as Tom Waits
and Randy Newman, Everett (who calls himself simply E) provides provocative
clues but encourages us to draw our own conclusions about the often
eccentric, troubled characters in his music.
You meet so many interesting case studies in Eels' highly acclaimed new
"Souljacker" album that it's a bit like spending a day in a therapist's
waiting room. The album starts with a boy who keeps getting picked on at
school because he's got too much facial hair, and he's looking for anyone
(his mother, Jesus) to save him.
Who knows what the real problem is in "Dog Faced Boy"? But that's what the
therapist gets paid for. Meanwhile, the song invites the outsider in us all
to weigh our own feelings of insecurity and think about how rational they
are.
Elsewhere in "Souljacker," we run across a friendly ghost, a teenage witch
and a woman who drives the car while her husband sleeps. Some of the
characters are simply confused and harmless, others so disoriented that they
are a touch menacing. In one song, Everett speaks about someone "marking time
on a broken watch."
"Woman Driving, Man Sleeping," one of the many songs from the album performed
during Sunday's 90-minute set, illustrates how Everett invites us to use our
own experience and outlook to fill in the blanks.
The reason the woman is driving and the man is sleeping could simply be that
it is her turn on a cross-country trip, but there's something in the anxious
melody that suggests something more relationship-defining is afoot.
Where Waits often romanticizes his characters' plight by putting them in
colorful late-night or barroom settings, Everett's figures sometimes seem
immobilized by their problems.
Backed by an adventurous three-piece band (guitarist Joe Gore, the
single-named drummer Butch and bassist Koool G Murder) that played with
inspired precision, whether aiming for a "Louie, Louie" rock primitivism or,
more typically, sophisticated funk and rock trimmings ˆ la prime Talking
Heads, Everett sang in a convincing, straightforward style that allowed him
to inject character into his tales without violating the mystery in them.
A bonus Sunday was the veteran performer's stage manner, which seemed far
more comfortable than three years ago in the same room. At that time, his
attempts to disguise his uneasiness with quirky touches were self-conscious
and distracting.
On Sunday, he put all his energy and emotion into the music, and it gave the
show a crisper pace and the songs a more solid foundation. He still found
time for playfulness, including a strong dose of Missy Elliott's "Get Ur
Freak On."
What ultimately makes Everett's music so affecting is its compassion, and
that message was most obvious near the end of the set, when he turned to
material from his most personal and affecting album, 1999's "Electro-Shock
Blues."
In the inspiring "P.S. You Rock My World," Everett notes how pressures and
uncertainties can cause people to lose their will. In the song, however, he
rejects such despair. "Maybe," he sings hopefully, "it's time to live."
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