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.
Back to articles