Let's set aside that the Eels are not for everyone. Some folks can't stand frontman E's sense of humor, which he calls "edgy" but is closer to a seven-year-old yelling "SHIT!" in a crowd to embarrass his parents. Not everyone likes his super-polished power pop stylings; in fact us indie folk are usually suspicious of a band as finely calibrated to the needs of cutesy, "alternative" pop radio as the Eels.
But you have to admit that E's had plenty of hits to make up for the misses. He has a knack for crossing obscenity and crass comments with heavy subject matter: the ballad "It's a Motherfucker", and the best songs on his "catchy tunes about cancer and death" album Electro-Shock Blues, combine this off-handed crassness with sincerely moving music, to put just the right spin on his personal fight with despair. And as for his pop, give him credit for clinging to the top tier of L. A.'s new breed of songwriters, rubbing up against Michael Penn on the soundtrack to The Anniversary Party, hanging out at Largo with Jon Brion, and hey-- maybe it was Aimee Mann who talked him into ditching his Souljacker-era homeless beard.
We didn't sharpen the knives when the Eels announced a new record, even if the title deserves a chuckle. E coined the word "shootenanny" to describe a fun shooting spree, but this pathetic title turns out to be ten times more clever than anything else on the album. Musically and lyrically, E is spent-- out of ideas, out of innovation, unable to cough up anything but by-the-numbers pop in the fourteen originals he wrote for this disc. The self-loathing and despair that seeps in around the edges touch so lightly that they can't give it a backbone. I'm not slamming this album to diss the man behind it, but to tell him he can do better. Much, much better.
E works country and blues into Shootenanny!; it opens as a polished, petrified bleat complete with harmonica, and reveals other would-be redneck classics like "Restraining Order Blues" and "Lone Wolf" as it spins on. Add to this superficial affectation E's stone-washed voice-- rougher than ever-- and you have the makings of an urban cowboy record, one that's sacrificed the splice-ups, orchestral fragments and family-friendly grooves that made him a rich man's Beck on previous outings.
The production as always sounds great, making fifty cent arrangements sound like a million bucks, but that doesn't save the music, which is as generic a set of post-post-Beatles pop as he could possibly turn out-- with some of the least involving melodies of his career, like the blase feel-good of "Rock Hard Times". He offers some passable bubblegum-- the alt-rock anthem "Saturday Morning"-- but only a few of these songs have anything fresh or engaging to offer. "Dirty Girl" or "Wrong About Bobby" muster fast, catchy hooks, and there's some graceful orchestration on "Numbered Days", showing E could have made a passable, catchy stop-gap album. Could have, if it weren't for the lyrics.
The author of the rich and witty words of Electro-Shock Blues cranks out rhymes so forced, they're reminiscent of your parents making up lines while they sing along to the radio. Good choruses are marred by poor verses on "Love of the Loveless" and "Dirty Girl"; his in-studio lyrics are never rewritten. "I made mistakes/ Everyone does/ Don't know why I did/ I guess just because." Was that even worth writing as a placeholder?
Then there's his clunky stab at redneck chic. Johnny Paycheck he ain't: the violent psychodramas hinted at by the lyrics never come to life, and the few dark lines are left so far out on their own that they're inconsequential-- the serial killer threats in "Rock Hard Times", and his repetitious boasts that he's a "lone wolf." "Wrong About Bobby" is full of purely belligerent shit-talk: there's some guy named Bobby, and there's something about a girlfriend, and how Bobby'd better not fuck with E or E'll...I played it five times and I still don't know or care what revenge E's mapping out. "Somebody Loves You" wraps things up like a late-night hangover on the men's room floor, so vague and saccharine, grasping exhaustedly for meaning but coming off a maudlin meditation on its own failure.
There are pleas for help on Shootenanny!, but he's recorded better pleas before. The problem isn't that the record's unlistenable, it's the half-assed, uninspired compositions themselves, scrawled on a Largo's cocktail napkin and run through auto-pilot, buttressed only by "craftsmanship" and token self-pity. The biggest alarm bell goes off on the second-to-last track, "Fashion Awards", which he wrote while watching the VH-1 Fashion Awards. Nothing signals muse-death better than a tune written in front of the tube, and E, if it's not too late, cancel your cable-- or better yet, make like Elvis, grab a gun and blow the idiot box to shit. There's a whole fucked-up post-9/11 world out there to sing and make tasteless, morbid jokes about, and I know you've got more to give us than this.
