Eels
Daisies Of The Galaxy
»
Eels
Daisies Of The Galaxy
Dreamworks, 2000
RiYL: Cake, Beck's Mutations, Gomez |
But his bland brand of modern pop just doesn't display enough originality to separate the new Eels album, Daisies Of The Galaxy, from the majority of today's Beck-esque hipster pop artists.
Daisies is somewhat of a mood rebound from 1998's Electro-Shock Blues, a consistently downbeat album made shortly after the loss of E's sister and mother. The new album's songs are primarily optimistic, featuring lines like "Me, I'm doing pretty good as of now ... I think, you know, I'll be okay" (from opener "Grace Kelly Blues"). The loping, upbeat "The Sound Of Fear" has a catchy progression highlighted by an energetic organ solo and a falsetto chorus.
But the album also has its share of stinkers, like "Flyswatter," which reprises the time-dishonored rhyme of "house" with "mouse" in the first verse and goes on to suggest inanely in the chorus that "icewater, flyswatter" is "gonna get you through the day." Or the sluggish, monotone "I Like Birds," on which E spends a whole two and a half minutes painting a one-dimensional character who likes nothing else except birds. E tries to disguise the acoustic song's simplicity with synthetic percussion, whistles and bleeps, but this approach features nothing that Beck didn't do 10 times better on his 1998 acoustic/electronic album, Mutations.
The music is played well enough: multi-instrumentalist E is accompanied in the studio by R.E.M.'s Peter Buck on piano, guitar and bass and Grant Lee Phillips of Grant Lee Buffalo on bass. And on a couple tracks, E shows a knack for writing a good hook ("Fear" and the autobiographical "A Daisy Through Concrete," for instance). But his methods and execution on Daisies lack the creativity and energy that make a great artist and don't bring anything new to rock's palette.
TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.