Day 54: "Daisies of the Galaxy" - Eels (2000)

This one has been a head-scratcher for a couple of days.  I've actually listened to this album two and a half times over the past 48 hours just to try and get a handle on it.  Sometimes I see an album in the pile and I know what I'm going to write about.  Sometimes, I listen to it and it reminds me of a person, place or experience I want to share.  But this is none of those things, it's an album by a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter filled with emotion - and it bothers me, because it makes me confront something of a failing in myself.

Listen to me here

If you're not familiar with Eels, they are really just one guy, Mark Oliver Everett, who produces weird, stripped down kind of blues-pop songs which are hard to put into a specific genre.  He's still going to this day, having performed at the Royal Albert Hall last year, which speaks volumes to both his prolific songwriting nature and his popularity.  I came across them because of my Dad.

As I've mentioned before, in my teenage years one of the few things which brought me and my Dad together was a love of discovering new music.  He'd been a musician in the sixties in Birmingham, part of a band that nearly nearly made it before the rest of his bandmates left to be in bands that did actually make it.  Without a band, he reassessed his options, went to an RAF recruiting station and changed the direction of his life forever.  However, his love of music, playing and listening, is certainly where I got my interest as well.

Part of our dynamic when I was a teenager was that I would desperately try and find bands that I had heard of before my Dad, and then select ones from that category who I thought might get the stamp of musical approval from my father.  Each and every time I would do this, I'd find some new act, excitedly sit my Dad down with them, and have him sit in stoic silence while the track played, and then for him to respond with "Yes, not bad, but you should really listen to Mark Fizzwizzle and the Magic Trumpets, an obscure prog-folk band from Liverpool who released 3 singles in 1971, they sounded kind of like that, but better."  No matter the genre, no matter the quality, no matter the critical reception, my Dad had already heard it before, done better, by someone else.

However, the other side of that coin wasn't quite so tarnished.  My Dad had a good ear for a catchy tune or a powerful live performance or a sense that a band had that elusive thing that would make them successful, and when he saw "Novocaine for the Soul" performed on Top of the Pops, I remember him going out and buying the Eels debut album, "Beautiful Freak" almost immediately after.

That album got a huge amount of airplay in our family home, as  it was something that literally the whole family enjoyed.  It remains one of my Mum's favourite albums to this day, and there was enough going on there for myself and my sister to gravitate to it equally.  Ironically, I don't own it - it was so ubiquitous in my parent's house that I had my fill and then some of every song on there.  When I can play every track start to finish from memory in my head, owning the physical media seems redundant.

Once I moved out of the familial home, I kind of stopped thinking about Eels particularly.  A couple of years later, on a visit home, I remember my Dad telling me there was a new Eels CD, and giving me a copy of it to listen to.  This was "Electro-shock Blues", a record so heartbreakingly depressing that I haven't listened to it in probably 18 years.  I own it, somewhere.  I just can't cope with it.

Generally, my instinct when it comes to confronting powerful emotions is to, well, not confront them.  At the forefront of any emotional situation, you'll just be able to make me out, the cloud of dust and speck on the horizon as I backpedal away as fast as is humanly possible.  It's not for lack of empathy, or social anxiety - but rather that I don't tend to have an off switch when things get emotional.  I'm either the surface level calm and friendly and happy, or I am a complete slave to anxiety, frustration, bleak depression, and on the flip side, giddy with joy, impulsively generous and extravagant.  Sometimes, it pays not to test your limits too much, and in the case of "Electro-shock Blues", it may as well have come with a parental advisory sticker on it which said "Warning:  This Album Contains Powerful Emotions And Will Make You Sad As Fuck".

Which bring me to this album.  It's an interesting indication of faith to me that despite the first album being played to death, and the second one hermetically sealed away in the Too Many Feelings vault, I still chose to buy the third album when it came out.  I'm fairly sure I heard "Mr E's Beautiful Blues" on the radio and thought "Oh, a new Eels song and it sounds...happier?  OK".  It joined my collection soon after, and it's here that I run into a problem.

People in the past have accused me of being a cynic, and there's a certain level of truth in that.  I tend to be cautious around unfettered outpourings of happiness as I am generally wondering what said happy person's angle is.  In the case of music, I have a very low bar before something I listen to becomes "twee" and "nicey nicey" and starts to make my teeth itch.  I have a hatred which burns with the heat of a supernova for those "covers of a good song by an earnest folk singer with an acoustic guitar or piano" which are the progeny of Gary Jules's cover of "Mad World" and every John Lewis Christmas commercial for the last 5 years.

This album isn't quite there, but there's a lot of songs on here that push that cynical response in me.  I get that this is a songwriter working through a dark period of his life and finding hope in small things, and on an intellectual level I can't fault that, but golly there's a part of me that just doesn't want to listen to it.   Which, in turn, makes me crazy and feel guilty that in part my own emotional immaturity is barring me from appreciating this album which, based on the critical response to it, is really quite good.

So here I find myself, intellectually able to see my own flaws and how they impact my enjoyment of this record, but unable or unwilling to make changes which will see me moving toward overcoming them.  Until then, this will sit, unloved, in my CD collection, waiting for the day when something brings me back to it with a new perspective.