Eels frontman and songwriter E (born Mark Oliver Everett) has been a lot of things: gas station attendant, quirky pop songwriter, MC Honky and now, with the 33 track Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, he has become Sam's Club, without the unholy Wal-Mart association.
Dwarfing the length and, with the exception of Electro-Shock Blues, the scope of any of his previous work, Blinking Lights is a 90-minute epic, mixing hushed acoustic laments, up-tempo piano rockers and a reoccurring \Blinking Lights"" lullaby theme.
A concept album of sorts, Blinking Lights sounds like a family history under the microscope. The excellent Electro-Shock Blues, written just after E's mother and sister's respective deaths from cancer and suicide, took a similar approach but was a darker, more ""in the moment"" release. The past seven years seem to have given him more perspective as Blinking Lights takes a much broader view of life and death, with spots of optimism even popping up now and then.
Neither a retread of older material nor something completely divorced from past Eels releases, Blinking Lights pulls in bits of E's past work-a little of Beautiful Freak's obsession with alienation here, a little weird pop circa Shootenanny! there-but also takes more liberties in playing with sound and lyrical variety.
""Railroad Man""-part of the ""sad lyrics, happy music"" school of songwriting-makes excellent use of a barely audible slide guitar to build up a country vibe that works remarkably well with Everett's burned-out vocals. An exception to the rule of his usual sadness, ""Going Fetal,"" easily the catchiest track on the album, takes the chords from the main riff of The Romantics' ""What I Like About You"" and throws out lines like ""Just get down under your desk / Feels like your mama's nest.""
Fairly unique in concept among rock albums, Blinking Lights' tracks, which span from the cradle to the grave, could be more easily compared to a shuffled ""Monty Python's Meaning of Life"" with hilarious replaced by forlorn.
Not surprisingly for a two-disc song cycle, Blinking Lights is far from consistent in quality, relying more on a ""throw it at the wall and see what sticks"" strategy, but where it succeeds it does so impressively. ""Dust of Ages,"" the strongest track from either disc, features what is positively the most moving string arrangement in the last few years of pop music. A dozen or so of the other songs here are among the band's best work.
After the surpassingly dark and beautiful Electroshock Blues, Everett seemed to have trouble writing songs to accommodate his gradually brightening world view. On Blinking Lights, he seems to have found his stride again in a big way, delivering some of his most poignant songs to date.
