Heard Here

Eels
Souljacker

When I got home at 1:30 in the morning about a week and a half ago, I saw a package sitting on the stairs with the telltale British postal stamp. I knew that my copy of the Eels latest album, Souljacker, had finally arrived. I am, to tell the truth, a little bit obsessed with this band; hence my ordering a copy off of amazon.co.uk so I could get it several months before its American release.
Souljacker, like Daisies of the Galaxy and Electro-Shock Blues before it, is unlike any previous album the band has produced. Whereas Electro-Shock was a bittersweet piece of therapy where frontman E dealt with his mother’s death and sister’s suicide, Daisies was an optimistic, moving-on-but-still-acknowledging-life’s-inherent-sadness kind of album. Souljacker is a different animal entirely, a snarling, rocking demonic (yes, I’ll say it) tour de force.
Joining E and drummer Butch on the album are Koool G Murder and Englishman John Parish. The Eels team on much of the album steps into the previously-unexplored (for the band, at least) territory of straight-ahead rock, but still manages to include suped-up versions of Eels traditional sweet sadness over thumping beats. All the songs are, of course, supported by E’s brilliant lyrics, at times beautiful and at times disturbing, but never boring.
The album kicks off with “Dog Faced Boy,” which sets the general tone of the album: a furious indictment of a cruel and unfair world, “Dog Faced Boy” at once assaults and energizes the listener. The theme resurfaces again on the next track, “That’s Not Really Funny,” and again on “Souljacker Part I,” which deals with happy stuff like serial murder and incest. The album title, by the way, comes from an American serial killer from the early 1990s who claimed to steal the souls of his victims. Neat. “Jungle Telegraph” also deals with the fun topic of forced underage prostitution and, well, shit. With jangling guitars and three layers of rhythm, interspersed with feedback horns, though, it manages to rock right through and with the rather bizarre lyrical stylings.
The true gem of the album, though, is the third track, “Fresh Feeling.” The most life-affirming of any song on the record, the main orchestration is a sample from “Selective Memory,” a song off Daisies of the Galaxy. Over soaring strings, maracas and a brilliant bass beat, E manages to sing “Words can’t be that strong/ My heart is reeling/ This is that fresh / That fresh feeling,” and not only mean it but have it work.
The band is recognizable as the same Eels of previous albums on “World of Shit,” which is of course more uplifting than both its lyrics and downbeat orchestration, and again on “Souljacker part II,” both songs featuring the low-fi melancholy that E has been putting out for more than a decade now. But Souljacker still manages to finish in a new way. Whereas previous albums invariably ended with upbeat optimism, “What Is This Note?” ends Souljacker with the greatest cruelty this world is capable of: the cruelty of middle-schoolers. The title is not in any way related to the song’s other lyrics, except as a response: the song itself is the note in question, a love note from one kid to another. E’s screamed and barely recognizable singing on the track finishes Souljacker on the same ass-kicking and disturbing note on which it begins. The album articulates in greater detail the awfulness of so much of the world than any of Eels’ previous efforts, but still manages to provide some –– if not much –– room for hope and happiness.

-Jacob Kramer-Duffield

Sense Field
Tonight and Forever

I have never really understood this whole “emo” thing.
Thus, most of what follows is essentially the result of ignorance, snobbery and a shortsighted prejudice against anything that is wimpy without resolve. It’s really not a big deal. While I’ve heard from several reliable sources that this ever-popular musical phenomena can actually appear in many deceptively similar, and equally-perplexing forms, I have always used the term “emo” simply to describe a strange, obsessively formulaic sub-genre of sentimental vanilla-rock crafted by 30-year old ex-punks who like to sniff glue and cuddle. If the current drug-free incarnation of David Crosby were thin tattooed, and just a little more self-righteous, that image would epitomize my crude simplification of the glorious “emo” movement. But seriously, a veritable army of wide-eyed pretty man-childs (who love their girlfriends almost as much as their mothers) has established a terrifying tradition that stretches amiably from the vintage Brit-pop imitations of Sunny Day, to the contemporary J. Crew punk regurgitations of Saves the Day. Indeed, from under the stale hum of a million ill-tuned Gibsons, one can hear the uplifting, ethereal yelp of a million choirboy voices extolling the virtues of adolescent love, truth and social harmony to the faithful masses. Oh no. Run for your lives.
To make matters worse, the group Sense Field, a formidable “emo” giant, has released a new album thoughtfully titled Tonight and Forever. Cashing on the same quiet-loud drones, pedantic lyrics and operatic vocal stylings that have always given grizzled punks cause to weep openly into tightly-clutched cans of Black Label, Sense Field’s most recent aural offense is a hideous amalgam of cringe-worthy pretension, yawn-inducing musicianship and grotesque melodrama. The song structures are boring, boring, boring. I liked it much better when Nirvana did it with passion, freshness, nuance and drugs ten years ago. Furthermore, the lyrics are the most pathetic collection of lame romantic catch phrases I have ever heard uttered from the lips of a so-called rock singer. Morrissey makes these guys look like a floral arrangement.
They’re not enraged, they’re concerned.
They’re not frustrated, they’re confused.
They’re not sensitive, they’re sentimental.
Most importantly, I’ve come to the conclusion that Sense Field’s biggest problem is that they have no capacity for irony. Sense Field wants simply to be wholly inspiring, profound and beautiful: a chest-thumping crew of little Thomas Mertons. How irritating. Instead, they have accomplished their goal of having no subtext, no complexity and no structural integrity. So this week, spark up a doob and listen to something else. I heard that the new Juvenile joint was pretty hype.

-Andrew Simmons