The late 90s were rough years for Mark Oliver Everett of The Eels.  The musician, often referred to as E, had already lost his father to a heart attack, as well as being the one to find the body.  One of the brightest spots of those years had to be the release of the band’s first album and major label debut Beautiful Freak.  That event was unfortunately marred by the suicide of E’s sister on the eve of the album’s launch.

Beautiful Freak went on to produce three modestly successful singles, several songs that appeared in major motion pictures and a BRIT (British Grammy) award for the band as Best International Breakthrough Act.  When E began writings songs for the group’s next album the death of his sister still loomed large.  But tragedy was on the horizon.  Several friends died and then his mother lost her battle with cancer.

As E dealt with death looming all around him and the realization that he was the only surviving member of his family, he used the songs on Electro-Shock Blues to deal with his grief and his eventual acceptance of these losses.  This album is a true concept album; every song is about the path this man takes to deal with the deaths of his entire family.  He uses excerpts from his sister’s diary, artwork from his father and poetry from his grandmother.  This is an album full of death and despair.  E said that “suicide, cancer, heart attacks… death is the greatest American taboo since sex.”  Despite the overwhelmingly positive critical response, and the subsequent cult following, this cultural aversion to death, particularly coming fresh on the heels of a much more “pop-friendly” debut, is likely responsible for the lack of love upon the album’s release.

The album itself is hauntingly beautiful.  One of the first album’s biggest hits was “Novocaine for the Soul” and Electro-Shock Blues responds directly to it with “The Medication is Wearing Off.”  In the first single E sang that “life is good/and I feel great.”  Contrast that with “the medication's wearing off/gonna hurt not a little, a lot/keep on tickin' you're not lickin' me.”  Two years of life certainly changed one man’s perspective.

The album opener, “Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor” deals directly with his sister’s suicide using lines from her diary like “but waking up is harder when you wanna die” and “I am going to a place where I am always high.”  This is poetry, morose and dark and difficult, but poetry nevertheless.  How difficult must it be to sing “my name is Elizabeth/my life is shit and piss” when that Elizabeth is not only your sister but also dead by her own hand?  The first half of the album is full of lines like “a perfect day for perfect pain,” “life is funny/but not ha ha funny/peculiar I guess/you think I got it all going my way/then why am I such a fucking mess?” and “yesterday was suckin' and /tomorrow's looking bad/who knew that today/was the only thing I had.”  This is the not the stuff of top 40 charts and repeated blasts from boom boxes on the beach.

But amidst the soul-wrenching search for meaning out of tragedy, something remarkable happens on this album.  E finds a way out of the emotional abyss.  It begins with the line “I am trying on “Electro-Shock Blues.”  It is not coincidental that the song named after a psychotherapeutic treatment is the song that shows the first glimmers of a man beginning to heal.  E continues to heal with the realization that “you’re dead but the world keeps spinning” on the album’s most upbeat song “Last Stop: This Town.”  E clearly has his “foot on the ladder/climbing up to the moon.” 

The tragedy E suffered through clearly put off fans looking for the next fun pop song.  But despite songs about cancer, hospitals and suicide, this is an album about healing and finding yourself again.  In the end this album is incredibly uplifting.  Despite losing everyone in his family, the last line E sings on the album is “and maybe it is time to live.”