The Eels, a Los Angeles trio formed by Mark Oliver Everett, debuted with a highly dramatic and personal "lo-fi" garage-rock, sustained by the leader's pained and "fatal" singing.

Everett, a Virginian who had moved to Los Angeles, had already released two solo albums under the pseudonym E, A Man Called E (Polydor, 1992) and Broken Toy Shop (1993), before forming the Eels. The concept of A Man Called E is a sort of musical autobiography. Throughout his songs, the highly vulnerable E describes all sorts of misfortunes (Hello Cruel World being the overture...), but this does not prevent him from arriving at the Symphony For Toy Piano In G Minor. The idea and the execution were worthy of Brian Wilson (Beach Boys).

The ballad from the album Beautiful Freak (Dreamworks, 1996) that made them famous, Novocaine For The Soul, is a cross between a depressed Beck rap and a dazed Flaming Lips ballad, arranged with a singable and slightly distorted guitar riff, a toy piano carillon, a majestic violin motif, and a cocktail lounge cadence.
All the tracks were recorded in a humble manner but boast unpredictable constructions and sophisticated arrangements. Susan's House (perhaps the peak) alternates a chorus worthy of a Billy Joel piano ballad with a spoken-word part over a sliver of trumpet and a hip-hop cadence. From that poignant melodism, the tender serenade of Beautiful Freak takes flight, which in its lyrics as much as in its vocals and arrangement of keyboards and violin recalls the faint romances of Lisa Germano. Spunky, still melancholically immersed in majestic chords of violin, piano, and organ, sublimes this art of being humble even when three or four instruments of the classical orchestra overlap.
My Beloved Monster is almost a novelty, whispered in an assortment of banjo, circus bass drum, trombone, and various out-of-tune notes, and Flower achieves a metaphysical effect by sampling and recycling even a soprano and alto choir. In such a morass of instruments, Everett's singing is imperturbable, always subdued and indifferent, never exhibitionist or triumphant.
The record appropriately closes with two songs of morbid and surreal atmospheres, Your Lucky Day In Hell and Manchild, in which the aforementioned tricks rarefy until they leave only an abstract cartilage of chords, which the voice takes care of connecting with shrewd craftsmanship.
Far from being baroque, Everett's sound is the quintessence of guitar rock. It is, in fact, the clever guitar accompaniment that elevates his gloomy laments into even epic songs, as happens with the melancholic and solemn riff that drives the elegy of Rags To Rags.
In short, the record contains two or three absolute masterpieces and a half-dozen tracks that would be the pride of any singer-songwriter. Above all, Everett reveals the personality and stature of a great "storyteller," a man who has something to say and knows how to say it superbly, in the tradition of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Nick Cave, and Kurt Cobain.

Broken Toy Shop (1993) was basically a concept about breaking up with a girlfriend.

Everett outdoes himself with the next record, Electro-Shock Blues (Dreamworks, 1998), a dark concept album inspired by all sorts of personal tragedies (a chain of deaths, including those of his father, mother, sister, and a couple of friends). Once again, the songs were recorded in all humility at home, but once again the arrangement is rich with violins, brass, keyboards, samples, and turntables. Everett thus casually serves up an Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor for female choir and string section, a danse macabre of metallurgical syncopations, jazz organ, and hellish voices like Cancer To The Cure, a My Descent Into Madness for gospel organ and a Renaissance minuet of violins and tambourines, and a Hospital Food for a small swing orchestra.
But the prize for the most stunning effect goes to Last Stop This Town, whose enchanting harpsichord carillon is suddenly torn apart by a brutal guitar riff (celestial background choir, bass and psychotic counter-vocals, violins, and angelic flutes).
The record teems with melodies that would be irresistible in a more jovial context. Instead, it is difficult to hum the sinister blues of Going To Your Funeral, the pop air of Climbing To The Moon, or the chant of The Medication Is Wearing Off. These are songs that seem to exorcise pain by profaning death.
At the nadir of moral depression, Everett slumps into the moribund register of Nick Drake: 3 Speed, Dead Of Winter, Electro-Shock Blues... increasingly desolate and "naked."
The record closes (with PS You Rock My World) in a deafening orchestra of violins playing a romantic theme while Everett struggles to find a meaning to life.
The sensation, not by chance, is sometimes that of a heartfelt requiem and other times that of unbridled despair.

Daisies Of The Galaxy (Dreamworks, 2000) leaves behind Electro-Shock Blues' gloom but suffers from the success syndrome. Everett's pop talent is wasted in lame ballads that alternatively recall REM (Flyswatter, I Like Birds) and U2 (Jeannie's Diary, Grace Kelly Blues). The echo of their masterpiece's excruciating depression still hovers over Mr E's Beautiful Blues, Grace Kelly Blues and The Sound Of Fear, but this time the music is far less shocking.

Souljacker (Geffen, 2001 - Dreamworks, 2002) keeps the band in that limbo of non-essential but non-despicable rock, and adds a philosophical dimension to the music. The album's swing from hard-rock (Dog Faced Boy) and boogie (Souljacker Part One) and rockabilly (Dog Faced Boy) to ballad (Fresh Feeling) and exotica (That's Not Really Funny) does not bode well for the future of the band, that seems incapable of re-attaining the magic of their Blues masterpiece. Friendly Ghost and Bus Stop Boxer are carefully crafted songs but hardly unique (not to mention the Beck-style samples of Jungle Telegraph). This is certainly their most upbeat album yet, and the most diverse, but not necessarily the most sincere and the most consistent.

I Am The Messiah (Spinart, 2003) is a parallel project by Mark Everett, disguised under the moniker Mc Honky. The album is a collage of found sounds, sound effects and tender melodies.

Returning to the Eels, Everett displayed a lighter, more casual tone. Shootenanny (Dreamworks, 2003) feels more like a collection of notes than a profound concept. Featuring Lisa Germano, this is Eels' most atmospheric album yet. He has relented the tension but increased the magic. There is precious little invention (All In A Days Work recycles blues and soul cliches, and Restraining Order Blues, Lone Wolf , Agony and Numbered Days subscribe to a generic pensive mood, like outtakes from Electro-Shock Blues), but his songs have never sounded so "complete", finished, irrevocable. It is not a coincidence that they also sound poppier, although their melodies are hardly Beatles-ian. Saturday Morning (replete with falsetto chorus), Love of the Loveless, Dirty Girl, and the standout, Wrong About Bobby, are emotionally stable and structurally solid, as if one aspect of the music strived to convey the quality of the other.

After three relatively minor Eels releases, Mark Everett poured his entire philosophy and every musical skill he has honed over the years into the Eels' double-CD 33-song monolith Blinking Lights And Other Revelations (Vagrant, 2005), an autobiographical concept, inspired by Bergman's film "Wild Strawberries", reportedly eight years in the making, that follows his own life from birth till "stardom". His self-analysis is largely a soliloquy that does not affect the music, which is, in turn, meticulously crafted. Theme From Blinking Lights, that opens the proceedings with Everett humming a Christmas-style singalong over simple guitar and xylophone patterns, Trouble With Dreams, a breezy pop melody with a soaring organ and a rhythm of xylophone that sounds like a ticking clock, Mother Mary, that generates a jazzy-reggae rhythm from bicycle noise and then layers a psychedelic refrain on a bluesy organ, Going Fetal, a catchy joyful ditty a` la Tommy Roe that fuses stereotypes of Mersey-beat, surf music and early garage-rock, Checkout Blues, a serving of orchestral easy-listening, Old Shit New Shit, with ringing guitar, theremin-like keyboards and loud and upbeat Phil Spector-ian production, Hey Man, a fast-paced rigmarole, If You See Natalie, with echoes of John Lennon's Imagine, Railroad Man, an old-fashioned country-rock, Losing Streak, a pop clockwork at a scherzo tempo (Cars-like keyboards staccato, brass-like fanfare, ska beat, soaring refrain) radiate humanity at its most basic and universal. This core quality lasts till the end, slowly mutating into something less personal and more universal, less matter-of-factual and more meaningful, all the way till the sentimental piano dirge The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight and the epic neoclassical finale of Things The Grandchildren Should Know, an anthem for the everyman.
Nonetheless, Everett sounds more comfortable when he captures childhood than than adulthood. A sense of magic exudes from From Which I Came, 50 seconds of cello drones and guitar reverbs lead to a catchy psychedelic melody drenched in gospel-y organ and Duane Eddy-ian twang, and Blinking Lights For Me, a Donovan-ian fairy tale.
A disturbing existential feeling is never too far from the main path, though. Besides the chamber spiritual Understanding Salesman and the chamber lied Dust of Ages (a Pachelbel-style adagio with Everett whispering over floating strings and organ), two arresting pieces that defy psychoanalysis, several songs throughout the album evoke the ghost of Tom Waits: the slow, sloppy, jazzy Son Of A Bitch, the melancholy piano ballad Suicide Life, and Last Time We Spoke (perhaps one too many Waits impersonations As the mood changes from youthful exuberance to mature regret, Everett pens the long pensive I'm Going To Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart for guitars and xylophone, and the solemn elegy to urban loneliness of Whatever Happened To Soy Bomb for guitar and cello.
There are few moments of high drama. The percussive, demonic The Other Shoe is the exception, not the rule.
The brief instrumental interludes (the lugubrious and haunting Marie Floating Over The Backyard for piano and wordless chanting, the doleful waltz of Bride of Theme From Blinking Lights, God's Silence) are sometimes more meaningful than the lyrics: they too radiate the same energy, just more of it, without the greenhouse effect of the poetic scaffolding.
Everett interprets music as calligraphy. On the downside, one can detect the perverse influence of the Apples In Stereo school of baroque pop, and occasionally even the perverse influence of the Beatles' White Album.
On the other hand, there is no question that Everett sings very confident in his ability to modulate a monotonous discourse into graceful, colorful, mesmerizing calligraphy. In a sense, that is the very reason that he does what he does on this album. He sings about himself being able to sing about himself, and turns an autobiography into a celebration of his qualities, and, indirectly, of music itself. Everett is one of the greatest living songwriters, and he knows it. This album stands not so much as a manifestation of this greatness, but of him being aware of it.

Everett used a chamber ensemble to revisit his classics on Eels With Strings (Vagrant, 2006).

Meet the Eels (2008) is a career anthology. Useless Trinkets (2008) is a collection of rarities.

The concept album Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs Of Desire (Vagrant, 2009) is almost the alter-ego of Blinking Lights And Other Revelations: a savage fresco of human passion. The dominant style is garage-rock (Prizefighter, Fresh Blood, Liliac Breeze, What's a Fella Gotta Do, Tremendous Dynamite) although the Eels can still craft bouncy pop (Beginner's Luck, In My Dreams) and Everett at this stage can't resist the modest acoustic folk litany (That Look You Give That Guy, The Longing, My Timing Is Off, Ordinary Man).

End Times (2010) is a concept about Everett's divorce, a more tragic version of Broken Toy Shop (1993), a depressing monologue in a skeletal albeit dignified style (Little Bird, In My Younger Days, On My Feet) whose main drawback is that it is consistently too straightforward to be also art (with the minor exceptions of the rocking Gone Man and the chamber-folk of A Line in the Dirt). This album continued the slide into a charming state of melancholy that had accelerated with Hombre Lobo. While more literate than either, Everett doesn't radiate the solemn epos of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and doesn't plunge into the apocalyptic bleakness of Neil Young's Tonight't the Night: he simply drifts into an increasingly placid inner world.

Tomorrow Morning (2010) closed the trilogy of sorts begun with Hombre Lobo and balanced the suicidal mood of the previous album with a more virile stand and a lot more stylistic variety. The bouncy, syncopated, electronic funk-rock Baby Loves Me, the grand string-bathed Broadway-ish aria of I'm A Hummingbird, the simple country-rock I Like the Way This Is Going and especially the jubilant stomping gospel of Looking Up reassured his audience that he was still a musician, after all.