For a while, it was pretty tough to find too much fault with Eels. The group’s brainchild, Mark Oliver Everett (“E” for short), had always been a master at combining diverse musical elements into something that felt both familiar and unique, and he had the pop intuition to draw listeners in from the get-go (and land on a few major motion-picture soundtracks in the process).
You add to these qualities a fantastic live show and it’s easy to see how E has managed to keep listeners interested for nearly two decades, even through the minor disaster that was his most recent effort, a three-album concept suite between 2009 and 2010.
The Eels’ 10th studio album, Wonderful, Glorious, however, is exactly the kind of record that could finally sap whatever bits of loyalty listeners had left for the group. This isn’t to say it’s a truly terrible piece of work, but there’s really nothing here to turn around the Eels’ steady decline, and you get the feeling that these are all songs you’ve heard before, only done better. To put it more bluntly, the lasting message of Wonderful, Glorious is that E is an artist who has finally, completely and utterly run out of ideas.
It doesn’t initially seem all that bad. Opener “Bombs Away” starts with a steady, driving percussion track, as well as some of the Eels’ typical flourishes. Crunchy guitar, bright keyboard and a recurring wrestling bell give it a unique instrumental feel, and its warm production gets the album off to a good start. It’s when E opens his mouth that the song collapses, and man, does it collapse quickly.
Using the line “Nobody listens to a whispering fool / Are you listening? I didn’t think so” as the song’s grand opening statement, it’s not long before E starts rhyming things like “church house mouse” with “house,” and spouting general nonsense about wanting to be heard, not wanting to be complacent, etc., etc. Coming from a man who’s never shied from being emotionally forthright through his ten loud rock and roll albums, the general conceit of this song is, quite honestly, idiotic to long-time listeners. If this is meant to be some sort of manifesto for a new, confident man at work here, E couldn’t have done it in a less interesting way.
Wonderful, Glorious is practically overflowing with these kinds of lyrical clunkers. Third track “Accident Prone,” a tender guitar-based love song, talks about a “happy accident” of running into the woman he loves and being grateful for being so “accident prone.” A decent play on words, to be sure, but E never takes the song anywhere, and instead repeats the punch line over, and over and over again. It’s the musical equivalent of being told a semi-decent joke ten times in a row, and such repetition makes a three-minute track feel like an hour-long slog. “Peach Blossoms” suffers from the same effect.
Or take single “New Alphabet,” which, despite boasting a powerful, clever chorus, also owns one of the worst opening verses in recorded history: “I’m in a good mood today / I’m so happy it’s not yesterday / It was brutal, with plenty of tissues / I guess you could say that I have issues.” It’s less rock ‘n roll poetics and more Whose Line hoedown.
When he’s not dropping these undercooked bits of claptrap, E either spends his time constructing painfully obvious innuendo (“Open My Present”), or just boring the listener to tears (“True Original”). Even the songs that aren’t too bad just sound done-to-death. “Kinda Fuzzy,” for example, has a decent amount of pop to it, but at the end of the day is still just a by-the-numbers Eels track.
The only truly redeeming moments of Wonderful, Glorious come in the album’s midsection, with the satisfying one-two punch of “The Turnaround” and “New Alphabet.” The former’s a gravelly slow-burner, in which E constructs a vivid mosaic of love, loss, self-hatred and alcoholism that steadily builds into an intense, guitar-swirl of a climax. All themes that E’s touched on before, for sure, but it’s never been this elegantly or stirringly orchestrated. The latter, despite its aforementioned plague of a first verse, still maintains enough steam as an effective mid-tempo rocker, with some clever lyrics later on to boot.
These are the only two songs you should bother hearing from Wonderful, Glorious. An unimaginative, undercooked and lyrically asinine effort, E’s tenth album may just be his weakest yet, adding another regrettable coda to what once was a dynamic and admirable career.
