Friday 13 November 2009

Fresh Blood - Eels

I think a lot of people from the UK will have a similar relationship to me as far as Eels go. After hearing Novocaine For The Soul and Susan's House in '96 there has not been much mainstream coverage apart from Hollywood film soundtracks - OK that's major mainstream but you get what I mean. The weird thing is you may think that from these tracks, such as Mr. E's Beautiful Blues, that Mark Oliver Everett (Eels is his project) is a happy go lucky kind of guy. Sadly this is not the case, he's had a tough time of it and this comes across in his songs. They tend to either be somber numbers or rocking out tracks. His story is something I may cover another time but let's stick with the music for now.

I had a friend who lent me a lot of their early stuff and I promptly went out and bought Soul Jacker, the 2001/2 release is rammed with tracks that you would enjoy and probably recognise as a hell of a lot of Eels tracks are used in TV and film sound tracks. I enjoy the rock side of Mark's mind and that's where Souljacker excels. The new album, Hombre Lobo, has a few of these tracks, Fresh Blood being one of them. While it may not hit the highs of Souljacker it already has me excited about the next album which is due to be released in 2010.


P.S. If you don't have Souljacker your music collection has a hole in it...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Love this little journal! By the way...and this is a bit random...I'm planning to move to Bristol soon, does it need a new hit of rock/indie/alternative music or is there a decent enough scene there?

Cheers!

John L said...

There's always room for more Dan that's for sure. Thanks for the comment.

John L said...

Oh and to carry on the soundtrack theme, Eels track "Friendly Ghost" was used in the first episode of Being Human - one of the characters being a ghost of course...