Personal catastrophe invites two possible responses – surrender or quiet, dignified resistance. Eels, the American indie-pop band who flaunt their private traumas like couture fashion, have stumbled upon a third way. They’ve learned to laugh at the grisly comedy that is life.
Not that you’d know it from their records, which are awash with avant-garde moroseness. Their most celebrated, 1998’s Electro Shock Blues, recalled the protracted death from cancer of the mother of singer and group leader, Mark Everett.
This year’s Blinking Lights And Other Revelations album swapped anguish for gentle maudlin, trafficking in brittle acoustic arrangements and furtive melodies. Neither project was notably packed with chortles.
Nonetheless, Eels possess a beating comic heart. To gain a sense of it one must encounter them in performance, where the dark wit of Everett’s song-writing is laid brightly bare.
Tonight’s concert is billed ‘Eels with strings’, which is another way of saying ‘Eels without guitars’. There are rasping violas in place of drums, and Everett’s ghostly piano notes fill the empty places that lack for bass and feedback.
Transcending the boundaries of guitar-rock clearly has a liberating effect on the singer, whose tweed suit, walking stick and battered air suggest a character from an Edgar Allen Poe novel, locked in his study and slipping towards madness.
Everett’s between-song patter is purest vaudeville, though. He trades jibes with hecklers and delivers his lyrics with sardonic glee, all the while looking as though he’d much rather find a quiet dark corner in which to crumple.
Drawing heavily from Blinking Lights, the set charts a course between cautious levity and asphyxiating glumness: 'Railroad Man' evokes the sadness implicit in vast, empty landscapes, while 'Marie Floating Over The Backyard' is a spirited jig of despair.
For the encore, Eels perform a strange, soporific cover of Prince’s 'I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man'. Hushed and funereal, it feels like the bleakest punch-line in the world.