Tunes of the week

Hyetal - 'Phoenix'



Sharon Van Etten - 'Love More'



Pink Moth - 'A Mirror We Found On The Ground'




Keepaway - '100'

Keepaway – 100 by Hypetrak

Keep Shelly In Athens - 'Fokionos Negro Street'

Fokionos Negri Street by Keep Shelly in Athens

Baths - 'Hall'



Gold Panda - 'I Suppose I Should Say 'Thanks' Or Some Shit'



Nouveaunoise - 'Goni'




Eels - 'Looking Up'

Eels - Looking Up by P.i.X

Tieranniesaur - 'Sketch!'



Actress - 'Lost'



Kurt Vile - 'Invisibility: Nonexistent'

Eels - Looking Up

The new eels album, Tomorrow Morning, will be released on August 24th. It's the third part of a rapid-fire trilogy that includes last year's Hombre Lobo and this year's End Times. If we're brutally honest, both those albums were fairly average and at times ('Little Bird' springs to mind) abysmal. Tomorrow Morning sounds interesting though. According to the official eels website:

TOMORROW MORNING is a new musical landscape: electronic keyboards, drum machines, tape loops and found sounds. "It's a very electronic album -- sounds normally associated with a kind of 'colder' music," says Everett, "but I wanted to make a warm album that was a celebration using electronic instruments to reflect joy in the times I live in."

Talk of the album being thematically about "A new beginning and another chance. The blooming of all new possibilities. The hope that was always there coming to fruition." is all very reminiscent of Daisies of the Galaxy, still my favourite eels album, but from the musical description this almost sounds Beautiful Freak-esque, which could be a great thing: in E's more bland moments I've often wished he'd be a bit more playful and rediscover his inner child, as it were. 'Looking Up' is available as a free sample of the album, in exchange for your e-mail address.

Staying on the subject of E, he was mistaken for a terrorist recently in London - according to http://www.nme.com/,

E from Eels was questioned by police in London's Hyde Park after they mistook him for a suspected terrorist. The singer, real name Mark Oliver Everett was taking a break from a day of interviews when police approached him thinking he fitted the description of a suspicious person they were looking for. After being let go once they realised he was innocent, the frontman said: "Not every guy with short hair and a long beard is a terrorist. Some of us just want to rock."

Indeed. Just as well he wasn't rocking the Souljacker look - http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/e/eels/album-souljacker-bonus-disc.jpg

eels play Electric Picnic later this year.

Eels, Friendly Fires, The Fall for Electric Picnic

Via On The Record, new additions to the Electric Picnic bill:

Eels
Friendly Fires
Laurent Garnier
The Fall
Fight Like Apes
Bonobo
Stornoway
Channel One

Friendly Fires are a terrific festival band, as anyone who saw them at Oxegen last year will testify. And who knows what incarnation of eels will show up? A hard-rocking revue or the acoustic/strings package? Judging by the aesthetic of this year's End Times album, it may well be the latter.

eels to release 'break-up abum'

If you were left a little disappointed by eels' 2009 release Hombre Lobo, it mightn't be time to write off Mark 'E' Everett just yet: on January 19th, another album will follow hot on its heels, and by the sound of things it's more in keeping with the agonisingly direct, soul-baring songwriting that led to classics like Electro-Shock Blues and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. E has a habit of writing music for separate projects simultaneously, and it may well be that Hombre Lobo was to the forthcoming album what records like Souljacker and Shootenanny! were to his ambitious Blinking Lights double-set: loose, rocky diversions from the thematic structures that characterise his more intense work.

Apparently this album is so personal that E is refusing to do interviews to promote it. From eels' official website:

" The eighth EELS studio album, END TIMES, is the sound of an artist growing older in uncertain times. An artist who has lost his great love while struggling with his faith in an increasingly hostile world teetering on self-destruction. Largely self-recorded on an old four track tape machine by EELS leader Mark Oliver Everett aka E in his Los Angeles basement, it's a "divorce album" with a modern twist: the artist equates his personal loss with the world he lives in losing its integrity. When Everett finds comfort "in a dying world," the END TIMES he speaks of isn't about "Mayan calendar conspiracy theory bullshit," he says, but, "the state of the desperate times we live in. The bottom line-ness of it all. The end of common decency. The loss of caring about doing a good job. These are tough times. Who can you trust? Walter Cronkite is just a ghost."

...While the last EELS album, HOMBRE LOBO tackled the subject of desire, "the before, the spark that ignites everything," Everett says, END TIMES is about the other side: the after. And while HOMBRE LOBO was written from the point of view of a fictional character, END TIMES is pure real life. "

Sample lyric:

"In my younger days
I would've just chalked it up
As part of my ongoing education
But I've had enough
Been through some stuff
And I don't need any more misery
To teach me what I should be
I just need you back"

- 'In My Younger Days'

Now when you bear in mind that eels' 1998 album Electro-Shock Blues dealt with the loss of Everett's sister to suicide and his mother's terminal illness in harrowing detail, it's a pretty safe bet that a break-up album from the same man probably isn't going to be the feel-good release of 2010.

The track 'Little Bird' is available as a free download from eels' official website:

http://www.eelstheband.com/

...and here's the video for 'In My Younger Days':

Albums Of The Decade : 11 - Eels - Daisies Of The Galaxy (2000)

When it was released at the turn of the decade, one critic described Daisies Of The Galaxy as being to previous eels album Electro-Shock Blues what the Manic Street Preachers' Everything Must Go was to The Holy Bible: in other words, Daisies represented the breaking of sunlight through the clouds after the harrowing subject matter of its predecessor (Electro-Shock Blues dealt with the terminal illness of E's mother and the suicide of his sister). While it's not quite that black-and-white (ESB had its moments of hard-won optimism), it's a pretty useful comparison. Daisies is remarkably light-on-its-feet throughout, even when picking through the bones of a break-up ('It's a Motherf**ker'). The first couple of tracks lay out the gentle, folky vibe that permeates the album, with lyrics like "A roomful of dust and a broom to sweep up/All the troubles you and i have seen"
all the more poignant given their context. There's a rousing, bouncy homage to his mother ('I Like Birds'), the odd, nightmarish rhythms of 'Flyswatter' and the found-sounds collage of 'Estate Sale', but the dominant tone of the album is summed up by the wistful, sublime title track.