EELS – END TIMES
” Everything was beautiful and free…in the beginning” – so starts End Times, an album that offers up the most imtimate and gritty of looks at Mark E Everett and the disintegration of his relation, his mortality and his ageing in an (apparently) increasingly uncertain world. While the look in the mirror is far from pretty, the album rides high on its lack of self-pity and startling honesty – ” Now I’m a statistic / But I’m not fatalistic / Not yet resigned to fate and I’m not gonna be ruled by hate”. And that wry sense of humour still shines through, never more so than on Paradise Blues – a song about a suicide bomber – “Kinda hard to blame somebody / For going to a better place / For thinking there is some kind of magic / Up there past outer space”. Recorded almost entirely by Everett on his own; this is a sparse, introspective, brutally frank album that is as painful to reflect upon as it is beautiful to take in – “I’m a man in great pain over great beauty . . . but I’m pretty sure I’ve been through worse / I’m sure I can take the hit.” For those up to the challenge this is a great way to start the year.
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