EELS: The Deconstruction

Eels have always been criminally underrated, to the point where you can hardly call them a one-hit wonder.  Novocaine for the Soul is a hell of a song, 20 years old and it hasn’t aged a day- but was it ever really a hit?  In a more tasteful and enlightened world, their fantastic debut album Beautiful Freak would have been met with heavy rotation, and Eels would have earned some of the spellbound reverence that was eventually bestowed on thematic descendants like Arcade Fire and The National. 

Then again, if Mark Everett Oliver had ever made a bigger dent on the mainstream, we might not have gotten an album like The Deconstruction.  This is E. at his most vulnerable, reflective and accessible.  He’s always had a flair for the melancholy, but there's also his aura of childlike hope.  That blend is more striking than ever.

“I had a premonition everything’s gonna be fine,” he sings on Premonition.  "You can kill or be killed, but the sun's gonna shine."  As a lyricist, E. is more plainspoken than ever.  And as a philosopher, he's sometimes brilliant.

The track Sweet Scorched Earth, for example, is everything that Eels fans have come to love.  It’s a love song set in the post-apocalypse, delivered with complete sincerity.  A delicate guitar melody, some well-placed orchestral flourishes, and lyrics that are equal parts bitter and sweet.  At only three minutes long, it's an epic.  Timeless and contemporary at once.

It’s not enough to call The Deconstruction one of Eels' best records.  This is, more accurately, a record that we need right now.  It’s the sound of beautiful sentiment in a bleak landscape.  And sure, beautiful/bleak has been the band’s signature for a long time.  But maybe the landscape is finally catching up to them.  A-