End Times

End Times may be a tunnel with no light at the end of it, but the bleakness is beautiful.

You’ll find Eels’ most revealing, autobiographical work-to-date to be the most beautiful break-up record since Beck’s ‘Sea Change’.

So in a sense the imperfections are actually its perfections because it represents E’s state of mind purely: his every whimsical thought, his waking up and not knowing how he’s going to feel that day and his whole-hearted honesty to allow every fucking shred of it be put to record because he has the audacity, intensity and conviction to do so.

This is a dark, sparse, elegantly--and enjoyably--somewhat mopey, paradoxical album. It’s emotionally raw, but devoid of self-pity. It's charming in its sense of irony and self-awareness.

There is a fascination in listening to Mark Everett, the kind of fascination that goes with picking scabs or blisters, or the strange inspiration from feeling someone somewhere is going through a worse time than you.

The album rewards those who listen with songs that are confessional but also insightful.

With its stark arrangements, glimpses of social disintegration, and thirtysomething neuroses (see I Need A Mother), it really is close to a masterpiece. [Feb 2010, p. 94]

If Noah And The Whale's The First Days Of Spring dealt with identical subject matter from a 20-year-old's perspective, 46-year-old Everett's tale is darker and more adult. And painfully brilliant. [Feb 2010, p. 104]

End Times plays to Everett’s strengths, offering enough intrigue and wonder to keep happy listeners new and old.

End Times is a break-up album that lashes relationship breakdown onto societal collapse, and rarely has Everett sounded so plaintive, so utterly broken down.

End Times is not merely Eels' best album yet, but in the highest rank of breakup albums, something with the anguished fury of Ryan Adam's "Heartbreaker," sighing with the stoic resignation of Bruce Springsteen's "Tunnel Of Love." [Feb 2010, p.83]

End Times is easily one of Eels' finest achievements. [Feb 2010, p.93]

End Times sounds like a record that could, maybe should, be performed from a psychologist's couch. But it's an intriguing dialogue nevertheless.

Through a dozen terse, exposed songs Mr. Everett proceeds from bittersweet memory to guilt to resentment to a kind of acceptance. Even the glimpses of self-pity stay matter of fact.

The album was recorded on a 4-track in the singer’s basement, and the lo-fi treatment certainly suits his grizzly voice. In fact, the downtrodden lyrics on the yelping stomper “Paradise Blues’’ and the jangly “Gone Man’’ are more or less redeemed by the songs’ sparsely elegant arrangements.

End Times will polarize opinion, winning as many people over as it will alienate, something E is ready for.

Because every Eels disc feels like a breakup album, this overt and actual one may at first seem redundant, or worse....But this also may be his most universal work, and it's heartfelt and true

End Times is a kind of breakup album with Everett's youth that's both shimmering yet emotionally ransacked, and an affecting entry to his long catalog.

Musically, End Times approaches Everett’s best work yet, but due to its narrow focus and exhausting reliance on theme, it falls just short of it.

Everett keeps these ballads and rockers short, spare and pretty; his sad reportage is straightforward to the point of being guileless.

In the long, twisted canon of break-up albums, Everett doesn't only miss the mark, but makes arguably the first serious misstep of his career.

E seems to walk a fine line between triumph and disaster on every album he releases, and even if on End Times Mr. Everett falls pretty obviously over the wrong side of that line, it's as easy to blame the flop on a trick of probability than on a clear artistic trajectory.

A foreboding chronicle of the unpleasantness to follow, the typical arc of a break-up tale never materializes as "The Beginning" promises.