Eels

Electro-Shock Blues
Dreamworks, 1998

This is the record that consummated my love affair with pop music as more than simply sounds and words – that cemented my belief in it as an art form, and as an always-unfolding story, and forever broadened my focus from catchy songs to albums and themes and meanings. To put it simply, Electro-Shock Blues is why you're reading this column.

Mark Oliver Everett began his career under the moniker "E", releasing two solo albums in the early '90s before joining with Jonathan "Butch" Norton and Tommy Walker to form Eels. Their first album Beautiful Freak was a modest success thanks to quirky songs with disaffected characters such as 'Novocaine For The Soul' and 'Susan's House'. The year it was released, Everett's sister Elizabeth committed suicide and his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Those two events became the tragic inspirations for the band's next record, Electro-Shock Blues, a concept album about illness, family and, above all, death – which Everett described as "the greatest American taboo since sex". It mixed childlike drawings and nursery rhyme melodies with songs about hospital wards and despair.

If the album sounds like a bit of a downer, well, it is. The first song is called 'Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor', following the thoughts of Everett's sister in her final moments. The next is called 'Going To Your Funeral'. Musically there are elements of jazz, bass-heavy rock and sounds of machinery, especially in the heavier numbers 'Cancer For The Cure' and 'Hospital Food'. The quieter tracks are minimal and eerie.

But the darkness doesn't last forever. The album isn't only about death but our coping with it, and so sunlight slowly begins to seep into the second half. In fact it is only the extraordinary gravity of the album's inspirations that make its final moments so very touching – a series of love songs in which the deadpan opening lines "I hate a lot of things/ But I love a few things/ And you are one of them" appear as hopelessly romantic. The last track is titled "P.S. You Rock My World" and begins: "I was at a funeral the day I realised/ I wanted to spend my life with you." The band's next record, Daisies Of The Galaxy, came out two years later. It was a much happier affair.