E Ain’t Heavy

The Eels frontman still feels like an insecure, lonely asshole.

By A.D. Amorosi

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ARCHIVES . Articles

March 21–28, 2002

music

E Ain’t Heavy

The Eels frontman still feels like an insecure, lonely asshole.

By A.D. Amorosi



eelness: E gazes out over the world of shit.

"I’m not some new-age kook. I don’t know what is going on and have no answers. Just trying to tell it like I see it." Mark Oliver Everett has no sexy answers to queries about the karmic backlash theme in his work both with the band the Eels and solo as E. His hair-trigger response lends force to the theory that the eccentric E is not the quaintly quirky, sonic sketch artist critics have made him out to be. He’s no Beck-meets-Ben Folds.

Hardly an abstractionist of emotion, the E found on 2000’s live, limited-edition Oh What a Beautiful Morning (E Works) and 2001’s Souljacker (DreamWorks) is blunt and unafraid to rock out about the darker side of life. Souljacker cribs ideas most familiar to E — desperation, yearning, isolation — then crumples the paper by approaching them in large, indicting gulps. The characters E assails, and the studious peeks into their brief comings and goings, are magnificently like the photorealist paintings of Chuck Close. E’s free-versed texts paint sunbursting pustules of concentrically circling detail, separately picking at a million squiggly aspects of the human disorder. But when you stand like a ship at a distance, these pixelated tales slowly reveal themselves as one larger portrait, an eerie evil universe unto itself.

Work has not altered his existence. And existence has not altered his work, despite all that occurred after having a hit song, "Novocaine for the Soul," in 1996. "I don’t think it has, really. I’m not living a famous life. When I go for a walk, I feel like an insecure, lonely asshole. Just like always. I don’t have to write songs about firing my chauffeur." After the blissful neuroses of ’96’s Beautiful Freak (DreamWorks), the intensely mournful, sample-dappled trippiness of Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies of the Galaxy (both DreamWorks) followed, a rippling response to the mind-blowing block of his father’s passing, his sister’s suicide and his mother’s diagnosis with lung cancer.

"Sometimes having no memory is good," says E. "You write about having no memory." Souljacker , worked on simultaneously with the two previous records, offers little relief from E’s melancholia while finding solace and new memories buried in strange crevices. "But it wasn’t a continuation of a story," says E. "It was its own thing." That thing offers up Columbine-like horror stories ("Dog Faced Boy," "That’s Not Really Funny," "Souljacker, Pt. 1"), tales of the unwanted ("Jungle Telegraph") and mod-Delta dirges ("World of Shit") that seemingly diffuse his pain and yearning while moving toward bigger topics.

From its rhythmic guitar crunch and voice-processed viciousness to its atomic-clock hammering, Souljacker is nightmarish zombie-rock. "It’s in me and it had to come out," says E, who produced the CD with PJ Harvey cohort/guitarist John Parish, who borrowed some unfragrant touches from his work on her oeuvre to create a slithering femme ferocity. Ultimately E offers little insight to what’s ferocious, fiendish or fabulous in his world beyond the savage republic of Souljacker and these parting words: "Grow a beard and everything will be alright."

The Eels will play at the TLA, Mon., March 25, 8 p.m., $15-$17, 334 South St., 215-336-2000, www.electricfactory.com.