Eels slip into a stripped-down sound
Eels
Somerville Theatre, Somerville, Massachusetts
June 29, 2005

by Marc Hirsh

originally published in The Boston Globe, July 1, 2005

“Are you ready to not rock?,” asked Eels frontman E midway through the band’s Wednesday performance at the Somerville Theatre, and both the question and the answer it received, an enthusiastic yes, were emblematic of the career of the man born into this world as Mark Oliver Everett. Since 1992’s A Man Called (E), Everett has put his sizable talents through so many configurations – studio hermit, alt-rocker, pop adept, old coot on a rant – that if he wants to recast his songs as chamber-pop ditties, as he’s doing on the current “Eels With Strings” tour, then his fans are happy to let him.

In a way, the timing couldn’t be better. Eels’ latest album Blinking Lights And Other Revelations (Vagrant) is their most straightforward in years, with E less interested in studio experimentation and sonic masks than in naked emotion. On stage, the stripped-down arrangements – the lineup consisted of a string quartet, an upright bass and a guitarist/multi-instrumentalist, while E flitted between piano, organ, toy piano and guitar – ensured that E’s breathy, stonefaced deadpan didn’t compromise the mournful warmth of material such as “The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight” and the anti-torch song “I’m Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn’t Break Your Heart.”

More often, though, the strings were more successful at conveying menace than comfort. More than a touch of the sinister laced many of the most successful numbers, like the snarling, Bo Diddley-like “Dog Faced Boy” and “Trouble With Dreams,” which culminated in a magnificent percussion breakdown when the strings were laid down in favor of maracas and shakers as guitarist Chet Lyster (affectionately dubbed “The Chet”) pounded away on a drum kit composed of nothing more than a garbage can and a suitcase.

That drum kit was one of plenty of signs that E hasn’t abandoned affectation completely. Instead of an opening act, the audience was treated to Crocodile Gena, a stop-motion children’s short from Russia about a lonely crocodile building a house in order to make friends. E himself talked to the audience primarily in ironic snippets, brandished an apparently unnecessary walking stick and dramatically lit up a cigar while playing “Flyswatter.” For many of the night’s 30 songs, though, the musician that the five-minute career retrospective that opened Eels’ set referred to as the band’s “1 Deeply Troubled Permanent Member” dropped the guise of some guy in the process of detachedly making music and simply became a man singing songs.

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