Thursday, February 14, 2013

Albums : Eels : Wonderful, Glorius

Albums : Eels : Wonderful, Glorius

Listen To Eels : Wonderful, Gloriuse

Who is Eels?
Dr. Hugh Everett III, Ph.D., was what Scientific American magazine calls "one of the most important scientists of the 20th century." A quantum physicist who authored The Many Worlds Theory, Everett inspired countless science fiction books, movies and Star Trek episodes with the concept of parallel universes. As a young teenager he exchanged letters with Albert Einstein, debating whether it was something random or unifying that held the universe together.

Until the age of eight, Hugh Everett lived in Washington, DC with his mother, Katharine Kennedy, a troubled poet and author, and his father, Col. Hugh Everett, Jr., US Army. As an adult, Dr. Everett settled in nearby Virginia, with his wife Nancy. They had a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, and a son, Mark Oliver.

Mark Oliver Everett showed no talent for physics, or even mathematics. He was much more interested in the records his sister was playing in the house.

Everyday after school one year, Elizabeth played Neil Young's AFTER THE GOLD RUSH album over and over. Mark listened. He never would have dreamt that one day he would record an album (DAISIES OF THE GALAXY) playing the same upright piano that Neil Young played on AFTER THE GOLD RUSH.

At the age of six, Mark found himself at the next door neighbor's garage sale where he saw the toy drum set that would change his life. He begged his parents for the $15 it cost to buy the set, and they relented. Most children that get a drum set play it for a week and then leave it in the closet until their parents have a garage sale. Unfortunately for the Everett family, Mark played those drums everyday for the next 10 years.

As a young teenager, after a period of trouble with the law, being arrested and thrown out of school, Mark started to pay attention to the acoustic guitar gathering dust in his sister's closet. He had already been making up little songs on the family's upright piano for years.

Mark had several friends that were coincidentally named Mark. To avoid confusion, they would refer to each other by their initials. Throughout his teens Mark Everett was "M.E." Gradually it was shortened to the even easier "E".

By the time he was 20, E was obsessed with writing songs and recording them on his secondhand 4 track cassette recorder. He wrote and recorded virtually every day of the next seven years.

At the age of 24, feeling stifled by the lack of inspiration and creative community in his Virginia neighborhood, E packed up everything he owned into a car and drove 3,000 miles across the country to Los Angeles, where he knew not one person.

He eventually moved into a tiny apartment above a garage in Atwater Village, on the East side of Los Angeles, and resumed his antisocial routine of waking up, writing and recording 4 track cassettes, going to one of many shitty jobs that he hated, coming home, writing and recording more, and going to sleep.

As time went on, from the time he started his obsessive song writing, the quality of the songs and production of his tapes slowly improved. Eventually someone heard some of his songs and asked him to record for a record label.

 Wonderful, Glorius Review
On his tenth album under the Eels moniker, Mark "E" Everett continues to follow his musical muse wherever it'll take him with Wonderful, Glorious. After so many records it seems like E would be well past the point of any new firsts, but this is the first album to be recorded in his expansive new studio, mysteriously named The Compound, as well as the first album written in collaboration with the rest of the band. This more open, organic process comes through on the songs, providing E and company with a refreshing amount of creative freedom after the relative confinement of doing a conceptual three-album trilogy (2009's Hombre Lobo and 2010's End Times and Tomorrow Morning). While this process and studio have made their impact musically, Eels fans can rest assured that E's melancholic, beaten-down lyricism remains intact. Proclaiming "Every time I find myself in this old bind, watching the death of all my hopes/In the ring so long gonna prove 'em wrong, I'm not knocked out but I'm on the ropes" during the sad yet hopeful "On the Ropes," the album finds Everett in a more grounded and, relatively, positive place. This feeling is reinforced on "New Alphabet," where Everett lets us know "It's looking good, I dug my way out/I'm changing up what the story's about," making it clear that this new way of making music is working for him both artistically and personally, and though there's plenty of evidence that E is still out there suffering for his art, it seems that his days are a little less dark than usual.


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Sources : Eels Photo | Listen To Wonderful, Glorious | Eels Biography | Wonderful, Glorius Review

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