Tag: dreamworks records

Eels – Souljacker [2001; DreamWorks Records, Universal]

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With their fourth studio album, Eels continue polishing their crusty strain of alternative rock and off-putting pop, with quick and usually open-ended stories of unsatisfied desires.  Pitting catchy choruses and hooky melodies against themes of death, depression, and an antagonistic world, the band busies up the base arrangements with a potpourri of background sounds, fragmentary samples, keyboard inflections, and murky filters on the vocals.  Touches like parade-style horns dove-tailing into raspy electric guitar, music-box piano against reversed synths, and the persistent lo-fi pressure in the clearly high-budget production help maintain an atmosphere of unpredictable oddities, and while the drowning of the vocals in studio effects keeps it from being as memorable as preceding albums in the group’s catalog, it still has some interesting expressions and experiments of its off-beat style.

Eels – Electro-Shock Blues [1998; DreamWorks Records]

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In Eels’ second album, the depression of their first is turned up sharply, with songs about dying on a bathroom floor, going to funerals, going insane, and eating hospital food filling the ~50-minute run-time.  Also changed is the clarity of their alt-rock style, with blurred textures, submersive mixing, and mumbled lyrics traded between overwhelmed electronics and submissive acoustics.  Lullaby-like bridges, interludes, and build-ups lend things a regular sense of drifting away that pairs well with the album art, and the balancing act between detachment and despair ends up providing the driving force behind much of the music.

Despite the weight of pessimism and regret present through pretty much the entire album, front-man Mark Everett manages to avoid seeming overwhelmed by his morose indulgences.  It tends to feel knowingly directed, even in the most down-cast points, and the numerous little production touches (e.g., brief twittering of birds, a moment of wind instruments, music-box under-points, etc.) indicate a careful molding of the material to its final form.