Eels – Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire

The titles say it all. In 2005, Mark Everett—or E, as he prefers being called—released an album under his Eels banner called Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, and it was exactly what its grandiose title suggested: An album that was both epic and revelatory, a sprawling double-discer in which our grizzled hero confronted head-on the death of his parents, by means of childhood reflection and sober-minded acceptance of life’s fragility. Four years later, he’s back with a set called Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire, and if the title is just as long, it’s also stranger and funnier and a bit less sweeping. The album itself is much the same way: It’s shorter—just one disc this time—and more concerned with matters primal and carnal. Blinking Lights was epic pop, but Hombre, with its werewolf-referencing title, is a dirty, raucous garage sound, pitching its tent closer to gothic blues than to Thriller-styled kitsch but maintaining a winking sense of humor nevertheless.

The title can’t help but recall a previous Eels song—“Dog-Faced Boy,” the lead track from Souljacker—and the album is surely meant to be an extended meditation on the feelings of that beastly character, whose affliction makes him genuinely special while guaranteeing that he will forever be an outcast, even as it fills him with the primal longing for companionship and acceptance. In a way, though, I’m also reminded of the HBO show True Blood; yes, werewolves bring with them a slightly different mythology than vampires do, but, as on that program, bloodlust is here used as a metaphor for sexual lust, while elements of the supernatural are used to focus our minds on what’s universally human.

Which is all just a roundabout way of saying that, while the title may reference a figure from campy mythology, the album itself is all about being human, and, more specifically, being man. Yes, the male libido makes another grand appearance here, in much the same way that it did on Jarvis Cocker’s recent, sex-obsessed gem Further Complications. But where Jarvis used his carnal appetites as a jumping-off point for exploring everything from social mores to existential concerns—and all manner of middle-aged neuroses in between—Everett has written a song cycle that is, as its subtitle suggests, all about longing. These are songs about love that may be at least partly physical, but is real and true nonetheless.

Much of the joy of any Eels album is in seeing the world from Everett’s idiosyncratic point of view, and, as a lyricist, he’s in top form here; these songs are howling and original, exhibiting a mastery of language in which the most minor turn of phrase results in sentiments both hilarious and heartbreaking. Here he explores all the issues surrounding romantic love and sexuality; he wrestles with self-esteem without dropping into corny self-deprecation, skidding from the braggadocio of  “Prizefighter” into the romantic anxiety of “That Look You Gave That Guy.” Songs like “Lilac Breeze” and “Fresh Blood” employ the werewolf imagery in defiant assertion of physical desire, but they’re tempered by the compassionate and comical expressions of doubt in “My Timing’s Off” and “Ordinary Man,” songs that ache with tenderness and understanding.

The music is similarly bipolar; the set’s hallmarks are its raging, pounding rockers, all primitive and howling, garage-rock blues and rootsy raves played with White Stripes minimalism and drenched in nasty, speaker-rattling feedback. But on just as many songs, Everett drops the distortion and slows the tempo for some surprisingly soulful ballads. Of course, this is all pretty different from the orchestral sweep of Blinking Lights, but then, how else would an artist as iconoclastic as Everett follow up a definitive epic like that one, if not by making something entirely its opposite? This is, in its own way, every bit as winning and profound as that album was, another deeply personal and creative statement from a pop eccentric whose work is frequently rewarding, and never anything less than interesting.

Related posts:

1. Eels – End Times
2. Patterson Hood – Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)

Tagged as: Los Angeles, Rock

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