EELS - Blinking Lights And Other Revelations

Has it ever happened to you, in the evening, to sit motionless in the dim light staring at the blinking lights of the Christmas tree, pondering the meaning of life? If your answer is yes, chances are you'll instantly warm to Mark Oliver Everett. Because it was precisely by watching those colored lights switch rhythmically on and off that the eccentric character better known as Mr. E came up with what he himself doesn't hesitate to call "the mother of all Eels albums".

A simple, perfect intuition of his: life works exactly like those lights, made up of an unceasing alternation between moments when everything seems to reveal its meaning and moments when everything seems to sink back into darkness. The only thing that matters is holding on to those instants of revelation, letting them become the road to follow.

"Blinking Lights And Other Revelations" is a record that's been a long time coming: its central theme dates all the way back to 1997, and the songs that make it up were written by Everett in his basement in Los Angeles over the years, in the gaps between one album or tour and the next. It's no surprise, then, that the sixth Eels album arrives as an ambitious double record, gathering no fewer than 33 new compositions for over an hour and a half of music. The previous "Shootenanny!", E now admits, was really just a kind of pastime knocked out in a handful of days during the complicated making of "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations": and indeed, this new, sprawling work, while not reaching the peaks of intensity of a soul-piercing album like "Electro-Shock Blues", immediately comes across as the brightest Eels record since "Daisies Of The Galaxy", of which it effectively sounds like the direct successor.

The two discs of "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations" amount to a full-blown Eels encyclopedia. There are the classic crystalline acoustic guitar chords, tailor-made to caress Mr. E's gravelly voice in its most intimate whispers. There are the unmistakable indie-pop carousels the Eels have always excelled at, full of filtered vocals, cheerfully vintage keyboards, drum chimes and electronic toys, even venturing into Beautiful Freak territory on "Sweet Li'l Thing". And there are the Randy Newman-style piano ballads, whose selection here is better than ever, from the old "Suicide Life" to "The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight", which reaches the lieder-like purity of an "I Think It's Going To Rain Today".

All elements that lead the Eels to crown, on "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations", their perfect sound, with that shimmering cleanliness of strings, horns, keyboards and chimes that always manages to feel measured rather than overblown.

If this kind of work has one limitation, it's precisely that of functioning as a perfect "greatest-hits primer" of a career, at times skirting the edges of self-plagiarism: isn't the idea behind "Trouble With Dreams" essentially the same as "Flyswatter"? And doesn't "Whatever Happened To Soy Bomb" sound like a revised and corrected version of "Grace Kelly Blues"?

But, as Riccardo Bertoncelli wrote about the latest album by Beck (whose approach, as it happens, doesn't seem too far removed from that of the Eels on "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations"...), rather than worrying about "hunting down certain parallels like some perverse Memory game", it's far better to surrender to the simplicity of the music: the point then shifts from a notion of originality that is ultimately an end in itself to a gaze capable of focusing, without prejudice, on the artist's inspiration.

And in the songs of "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations", there's inspiration to spare.

Just listen to the haunted-house party of "Old Shit / New Shit", which with its bittersweet nonchalance floats along jingling amid the howls of some friendly ghost. E himself, for that matter, acknowledges there's a kind of "ghostly sound" to this record: "Maybe because I live with a bunch of ghosts," he adds.

And again, how can you resist the audacious meeting of Van Morrison and Smash Mouth on "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)", or the organ-and-keyboard hoedown that erupts at the tail end of the driving tick-tock of "Trouble With Dreams"? Or, on the more intimate side, how not to fall for the delicate country-folk of "Railroad Man" or the bitterness-worn blues of "I'm Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart"?

If with "Shootenanny!" E seemed to have scattered his talent across too many side projects, between pseudonyms, soundtracks and b-sides, this time the American songwriter has decided to cram all his multifaceted visions into a single album, creating a kind of concept record that unfolds following the leitmotif of the "blinking lights theme".

A theme that resurfaces in a series of short instrumental pieces, light and airy like the compositions Badly Drawn Boy wrote for the soundtrack of "About A Boy", and which on "Blinking Lights (For Me)" fades into the memory of a plane crash Everett witnessed as a child, right near his childhood home in Virginia: since then, according to the song's subtitle, the man known as E has learned to stop worrying and love planes, car accidents and psychic suffering...

On "Souljacker" and "Shootenanny!", the Eels presented themselves almost as a genuine rock band: on "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations", however, the focus returns solely to Mark Oliver Everett, in the full nakedness of his confessions, rediscovering the pleasure of tinkering and experimenting with his own music.

Alongside him, as usual, besides the trusty drummers Butch and Puddin', bassist Kool G Murder and guitarist Chet, there's a list of illustrious guests: from Peter Buck, who had already collaborated on "Daisies Of The Galaxy" and helps give a sweetly R.E.M.-like quality to the splendid "To Lick Your Boots", to Tom Waits, who growls in his inimitable way on "Going Fetal", right up to John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful, who plays autoharp on the instrumental "Dusk: A Peach In The Orchard". But above all, there's the debut of Mr. E's new dog, Bobby jr., whose yelp introduces the little waltz of "Last Time We Spoke", making the cat Slinky green with envy, having only been mentioned in the lyrics of one of the Eels' earliest classics, "Fucker"...

The bucolic cover image is a youthful photograph of Everett's mother, who died in 1998 of a serious illness, and the booklet too is full of old sepia-toned family photos. It's a family that seems to be haunted by the shadow of the curse that first struck E's father, felled by a heart attack when his son was still a teenager, and then his mother and sister, whose suicide is at the heart of "Electro-Shock Blues". Even E's cousin was killed on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th...

"Is the curse stronger than me or am I stronger than the curse?", E asks in "Checkout Blues". But there's no despair in his voice. In fact, in "Things That Grandchildren Should Know" the Eels frontman even reaches a final peace with the memory of his father, realizing he never truly managed to understand him. "I feel like he's here with me now/ Even though he's dead".

In E's own words, "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations" is an album about God and all the questions tied to the subject of God, an album about clinging to the last scraps of one's sanity and about the blue sky that arrives the day after a terrible storm: it's a love letter to life itself, "in all its wonderful, horrible glory".

The fact is the world seems like a mad, hostile place. Sometimes it's like being the last engineer of the railroad age, the one who in "Railroad Man" sadly watches the days of the railways come to an end: "Things are faster now, this train is just too slow".

Dreams alone aren't enough to sustain a life. The trouble with dreams, the Eels warn in "Trouble With Dreams", is that they don't come true, and when they do come true, it's too late to reach them.

Rather, it's the yearning for a place to belong that can reopen the heart to reality: a place where you let the water wash away every lie, as E sings in the drifting, hazy "In The Yard, Behind The Church".

Then life finds its truth again, and you can finally say, as in "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)", that you're "really living", whether you're lying on the floor screaming until you can't anymore, or you're in love with a girl who makes you feel like the world isn't such a bad place.

Only then can destiny become a road to travel, no longer a looming curse: "It's not where you're coming from, it's where you're going to / And I just wanna go with you", is the conclusion of "The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight".

All that's left is to look up again at the deep night sky: "The sky is dark now / But it's the best dark I ever had". Among the flickering lights, this time, the one that's lit up really is a star.

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30/04/2026