End Times

“Well, it’s a pretty bad place outside this door / I could go out there but I don’t see what for.” Eels' eighth set is Mark Oliver Everett’s self-described ‘divorce album’, painting him as a Gatsby-esque figure, rattling around his Los Angeles home alone. “It’s just me, myself, and the secrets that live within the walls / of the Mansions of Los Feliz”. Written and primarily self-recorded in his own basement, this record tells a true story as laden with a deep sadness as anything Fitzgerald’s fiction ever imagined. Stories told with poetry, sung from a neighbourhood which Everett sings as a near homophone for ‘lost feelings’.

With the end of the world looming just two short years away in 2012, it seems fitting that Eels' Mark Everett would offer his prescient insight into the collective apocalyptic consciousness on his latest opus, End Times. Only six months removed from Hombre Lobo, his lycanthrope-themed exploration of the nature of human desire, it can be argued that his latest is as natural a progression as any of Everett’s work. After all, his choice in album topics has always alternated between the absurd and the melancholy. And considering the recent concept album and, before that, his significant contribution to the Yes Man soundtrack, it was time for some despondent balladry.