Hi there. My name’s Dave and I will be stopping by here intermittently to review albums, books, films, comics and – oh – stuff. Hopefully in the future this will become a regular consistent thing with some kind of clear-cut purpose (weekly reviews of new films being one option) but for the first couple of weeks at least I’m just going to be talking about my recent purchases, so expect plenty of bias. With that in mind:

Eels / Blinking Lights and over Revelations (CD)

Eels are essentially Mark Oliver Everett, AKA ‘E’, and an ever-changing line-up of musician buddies, with drummer Butch the only other constant over the course of their (now) six albums. This time around, we have luminaries like REM’s Peter Buck and growling Hellboy look-alike Tom Waits adding their vibe to a double-CD goliath that rolls in at 33 tracks and just under 94 minutes.

Partly due to the rotating line-up and partly because ‘E’ seems to enjoy pushing himself in new and seemingly-random directions, it’s hard to know what to expect from an Eels album. Their last two entries were pure rock and a world away from the sweet melancholia of, say, ‘Daisies of the Galaxy.’ ‘Blinking Lights’ is another departure – but this time because it doesn’t push the band into uncharted waters so much as bring together everything they’ve done before in one place and one sound. It does rock, sure, there’s funk and blues and country here too, just about everything that E has ever toyed with – and it all gels perfectly. In a way, a good way, ‘Blinking Lights’ feels like a ‘best of’ compilation.

Sure, there are moments of over-familiarity – E is as scathingly honest and open as ever, and regular listeners probably know more about his life than their own; he likes his plinky-plonky keyboard tunes just as much now as he always has. And there’s the question of whether any album really needs to be this damn long – the shorter instrumental numbers might be seen by some as needless padding. But ‘Blinking Lights’ actually works amazingly well as a single entity, never losing its momentum, never failing to surprise in subtle ways, remaining funny and touching even after many listens. Working on such a grand scale allows pacing, shifts in tone and style, that would have been lost if this had been congested into a standard ten-tracker.

There are too many standout tracks to list, but good places to start are ‘Trouble With Dreams,’ ‘Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)’ and what really needs to be this summer’s dance sensation, ‘Going fetal’: “everyone is going fetal / it’s the dance the kids all feel / just get down under your desk / feels like your mama’s nest.”

If you know Eels and like them then this is an essential purchase, perhaps their best album and certainly their best since the almost-untoppable ‘Electro-Shock Blues.’ If you don’t know them or remember them as the band that did ‘Susan’s House’ then this is a good place to start – a great band on great form, a reminder of why life is usually worth living and occasionally feels like it isn’t, a definite revelation all of its own.