Always a reliable purveyor of indie rock melodies, the American Mark Oliver Everett keeps a generous heart and a warmly melancholic spirit.
“Your car is broken/Your dog is sick and it’s cold/Your boss can’t wait to fire you/I stand ready.” The song I’m on Standby, a hushed ode to friendship, sums up why Mark Oliver Everett has continued to record since the mid-1990s under the moniker Eels.
With his warmly mid-tempo indie rock songs, he is there to accompany the most desperate moments of our lives and to reach out a hand so that we can hold on, climb back up… and perhaps join him. Normally, anyone who writes a deeply moving ballad about mortality (the poignant All Forgotten, with its clouds of poetic strings) should be watched closely by those around them.
Everett has long used music as his own therapy
Even more so when he digs into his archives to unearth a piano ballad like Taking Pictures, with a very pure melancholy but a sad image—whatever becomes of the models in the photos exchanged at auctions? No need to dwell too much: Everett has long used music as his own therapy.
It’s the same figure—a faux melancholic gentleman—who borrows from the Sesame Street character, the blue Cookie Monster, to title this sixteenth album, which also integrates onomatopoeias drawn from the old Batman television series in One Razzle, One Dazzle.
So, no, there is no need to worry about this singer-songwriter with dark humor and intact empathy. With a whistle-able guitar riff, Lost and Barking offers a mocking yet tender look at the youthful missteps we all carry within, as we compare ourselves to wild dogs.
Cookie Happened (E Works/PIAS). Out on October 16.
