If sad bastard music is looking to nominate a new key-holder, consider End Times as Mark Oliver Everett's formal bid. Over the course of eight studio albums as Eels, Everett has made a career of feeling sorry for himself in some capacity-- typically, these misanthropic leanings have been juxtaposed against childlike flits of whimsy or coffee-black observations of varying degrees of wit. He was, for the most part, never humorless; he was gratingly self-referential and bogged-down by the Leonard Cohen-as-Eeyore thing he does. End Times does the sadness without the humor. Everett has described the album as a reaction to "the state of the desperate times we live in," and it chronicles a very personal break-up through a prism of a collective hard times. It is by all accounts a break-up album, but one that's plodding, boring, and full of icky self-pity. "Now I'm a statistic, but I'm not fatalistic," Everett's sings on "In My Younger Days", "I'm not yet resigned to fate." Like on much of End Times, the guy couldn't be further off-base.
It starts with "The Beginning", a disparate picture of a down-on-their-luck couple that still views the world as "beautiful and free." A foreboding chronicle of the unpleasantness to follow, the typical arc of a break-up tale never materializes as "The Beginning" promises. Instead, the remainder of the record refuses to delve into any emotion more complex than pity or self-doubt (save for "Unhinged", the only moment where Everett takes a break from blaming himself and musters the courage to call his lover "crazy"), until we arrive at "On My Feet", which really requires no further explanation. This isn't to say you don't kind of feel for the guy-- after all, you'd have to endure some seriously damaging emotional stuff to want to drag your fans through 40 minutes of it as well--especially without any real emotional payout.
Somehow, this makes the outlying "end of times" correlation even more disingenuous. At its least intrusive, it just feels tacked-on: "Gone Man", a rare mid-tempo bid here, effuses like it's drinking to forget, but ultimately finds Everett mulling over every misstep. When there does seem to be something to say about the breakdown (not just the break-up), it comes off even cheaper. "Paradise Blues" finds Everett back in tongue-in-cheek mode, but it blows up in his face so spectacularly, it's pure contrivance. Eventually, Everett's disassociation with himself results in a disassociation with the music, as each painfully plain entry becomes simply exhaustively dull. By the end, he's left singing to the "only friend [he] has in the world," the little bird on the back porch-- just in case you were wondering how sucky this thing could truly get.
