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End Times starts, logically, with ‘The Beginning’, a stunning paean of love, loss and heartache. Setting the tone for the album itself, this stripped back ditty reminds us exactly what makes Eels so unnervingly brilliant. On their eighth album, they stay true to form in their machinations of art from misery; pop from catastrophe and embitterment; beauty from heart wrenching bitterness.
Almost as an endnote to the catalogue of tragedies that have befallen Mark ‘E’ Everett – the suicide of his sister, the death of his mother, his strained relationship with his quantum physicist father, the death of his cousin in the 9/11 attacks – End Times is E’s ‘divorce’ album. However, where even the most troubled of Eels’ back catalogue was flecked with hope (such as Electro-Shock Blues’ ‘PS You Rock my World’), there is little to quell the sense of cataclysm and inner perdition of 'End Times'.
As in other albums, the listener is promoted to voyeur of miserablism: each track has a feel of a torn out diary entry, left to wilt on a deserted marital bed for our perusal. However, the deft artistry that weaves these candidly poignant reflections leaves them far from mere self-indulgence. There is a note of self-acceptance and wisdom, such as ‘In my Younger Days’: “I don’t need any more misery to teach me what I should be, I just need you back.”
Despite the lo-fi recording and stripped back acoustics, Eels remain true to form in creating pop songs which manage to crawl out from the emotional rubble of their genesis into something fresh and intriguing. In the title track, as in ‘Little Bird’ and the more up-tempo ‘Paradise Blues’, Everett eschews introspection for a theatrical tableau of idiosyncratic characters and scenarios.
The beauty of End Times lies in its unexpected turns and interjections: the dialogue of ‘Apple Trees’; the (albeit 6th form-poetry) pathetic fallacy of rainclouds, downpour and tolling bells of ‘High and Lonesome’. It’s these, and E’s brilliant ethereality, which elevate the record over and above a simple, downbeat anti-romance. The devastatingly plaintive admission on ‘Little Bird’ of “goddam, I miss that girl” marks an epitaphic surmise to the album as a whole. It’s in this dejected simplicity, perhaps, that we see Eels at their most despairing. Closer ‘On my Feet’, however, offers a glimmer of hope among the detritus: “I just gotta get back on my feet.” For your sake and ours, E, please do.
