EELS - "HEY MAN (NOW YOU'RE REALLY LIVING)" (VAGRANT RECORDS - 2nd May 2005 - Indie - www.eelstheband )
It can't have been easy being EELS' frontman Mark 'E' Everett in recent years. Having suffered a series of personal traumas (losing his parents and sister in a relatively short space of time), E has also been forced to cope with the slings and arrows of fatal fame which threatened to prick his skin and send him into commercial overdrive after Eels' debut album "Beautiful Freak" arrived during Britpop's death throes.
Perhaps for the sake of his sanity as much as anything else, E has carefully eschewed the trappings of mass success since then, yet has ensured his critical stock has remained high with a series of excellent quirky pop albums such as "Electro-Shock Blues","Daisies Of The Galaxy" and "Hootenanny." And by the sounds of this single, he's about to do it again with imminent new album "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations."
Because "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)" is typically catchy'n'immediate pop with enough oddball twists to keep it fresh and engaging. It's a beat-heavy, clap-happy affair that sounds celebratory on the surface, yet remains introspective (dare we suggest 'therapeutic'?) on the inside. "Do you know what it's like to fall on the floor/ cry your guts out 'til you got no more?" is hardly a regular Top 10 opening gambit, but it's a credit to E that he couches his emotional baggage in kookily memorable pop tunes that we can all consume with his bitter(sweet) lyrical pills. "Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)" is - predictably - yet another of these juxtapositions and another fine single to boot.
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E's personal traumas continue to inform his creative ascendency, but for all that, Eels remain a most necessary-sounding spanner willing to be thrown into commercial pop's works. Let's hope they can maintain the impressive level of tuneful sabotage when the new album arrives.
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