When a book is written years from now on the progressive Los Angeles/Echo Park singer-songwriter scene, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that Mark Oliver Everett -- who calls himself "E" and is now the sole member of one of the last mid-'90s alt-rock bands the Eels -- will get one of the shortest chapters. History will say that Everett couldn't compete, that he never had the critical plaudits of Aimee Mann, the sales of Fiona Apple or the legacy of Elliott Smith.
What he does possess, and what he will ultimately be remembered for, is a deep-hearted affection for life's darker eccentricities and an attuned sense for outr storytelling and classical pop sensibilities. On his strongest albums -- 1996's wryly winning "Beautiful Freak" and 1998's haunting and elegaic "Electro-Shock Blues" -- Everett conjures up startling frank imagery and turns out catchy pop ditties set to beguiling kitchen-sink arrangements. Even his weakest efforts manage to hold on to those basic elements, if not all at the same time.
I was not popular in middle school. Unathletic, academically lazy and lacking in social graces, I turned toward unhealthy obsessions with pop culture. Listening to the Eels was one of the few things that kept me sane; knowing that reject/nerd culture was alive, kicking and okay in 1996 helped me to embrace myself finally as a human being. I have Mark Everett to thank for that. (You can stop gagging now.)
To be sure, the Eels were my favorite band in middle school and early high school, and their half-ironic nerd-pop was a perfect soundtrack for the lives of "Kids Who Sat at the Back of the Bus." Yet over the last few years, their output has steadily declined, resulting in the forced edginess of 2001's "Souljacker" and the embarrassing hokey-crap aesthetic of 2003's "Shootenanny."
I had mixed emotions when I heard that Everett's next record would be a double album centered loosely on the theme of religion. Instantly, it brought to mind the death-obsessed genius of "Electro-Shock Blues." But a double album? Most of Everett's best single albums have their fair share of filler, and the pomposity of the early press releases -- which, among other things, pointed out how "It's a Motherf****r," his pained ode to his late sister, was singled out by the Bush campaign in 2000 as an obscene work -- brought to mind the "meaningful" serial-killer conceptual bullcrap behind "Souljacker."
It's a pleasant surprise, then, that with "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations," Everett has finally carved out a second masterpiece, a work as sprawling and intimate as "Blues" that ranks among the year's best. Filled with an eclectic mix of catchy pop gems, folky guitar meditations and exploratory instrumental tracks placed at junctures throughout the 97-minute runtime, the album is the product of two years of nearly non-stop songwriting.
"From Which I Came/A Magic World" sets the stage early in disc one. A swirl of strings, harmonium and reversed samples segues into an uptempo rocker with chunky guitar riffs and enough vocal filters to make Everett sound like he's singing through a mouthful of lit cigarettes. Of course, none of this would matter if the song didn't also pack one of the sweetest melodies in Everett's songwriting career.
Everett, a reverent songwriter, draws upon new inspiration for the album's more daring pieces. The agit-quirk, operatic background vocals and pulsing drums of "Old Shit/New Shit" evoke Rodd Keith's most ambitious work, while the Moog and sax interplay of "Hey Man" convulse into an orgiastic Prince-style vocal rave-up.
"Trouble with Dreams," an obvious candidate for a single, revisits an old Everett chestnut: reworking and recontextualizing the arrangements of past songs to new effect. Here, the eerie glockenspiel and muddled Wurlitzer from 1999's "Flyswatter" become human and fragile.
The best track, though, is one of the least ambitious -- a jangly and melancholy meditation on cultural ephemera titled "Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb." Everett's guitar is supplemented with banjo and string quartet as he ponders the minutia with which we identify ourselves: "Thrift store shirts and old haircuts / Living in an old sitcom / Whatever happened to Soy Bomb?"
"Lights" is not without its share of problems. "Ugly Love" revisits old Everett themes in the most hamfisted and cloying way possible, and some of the instrumental interludes aren't nearly as moving or interesting as they should be, substituting tape hiss and toy piano for genuine atmospherics. Being only seventeen minutes over the maximum length of a standard CD, elitist indie naysayers could accuse Everett of the oh-so-boring charge that the work is overly indulgent and that he could have cut a few tracks to make it a single album without much loss to the overall work. They're probably right.
But screw them. All the bands they like are self-indulgent too (that's why they call it art, sucko), and at least the Eels can write a beautifully cheesy country-pop ballad like "Railroad Man" and perform it with a straight face.
This album is like meeting your embarrassing friend from middle school -- the one who cried when he lost on a technicality at Putt Putt, or the one who farted that time in gym class -- for the first time in years and discovering that they're really cool and that you had no reason to be embarrassed in the first place. "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations" is a near-perfect chunk of instant nostalgia for junior high, that simpler time when all it took to make you happy was not having Algebra homework and going to Laserquest.
Nerd culture is dead. Long live nerd culture.
