Music Sounds Better With You #8

‘It’s A Motherfucker’ – Eels

(Neatly appropriate, given my recent gig-going exploits.)

There comes a time in every hardened rock fan’s life when sheer volume alone no longer quite suffices. When amps turned up to eleven is no longer a sure-fire way of getting the juices flowing. When what might at one time have been most likely regarded as a glorious racket is now more often perceived as an unholy din. (C’mon, get to the point, granddad.) When, y’know, your musical tastes might be said to deepen and broaden and – whisper it – mellow and mature.

Well, the third Eels album, Daisies Of The Galaxy, entered my life at just the right time. Before long, it had me eating out of the palm of its hand. “Who needs volume”, I scoffed, “when you’ve got warmth, charm and beauty in spades?”. The record is packed full of wonderful examples, but without doubt the warmest, the most charming, the most beautiful is ‘It’s A Motherfucker’. A wryly-titled attempt to come to terms with the loss of his mother, E’s masterpiece weighs in at just over two minutes in length but is inordinately heavier in terms of its emotional resonance, so simple and yet so phenomenally effective. Anyone wavering over or doubting the capacity of music to speak more powerfully than any other art form, I implore you – just listen to this song.

Inspired a love of: some of the mellower “indie” bands I used to recoil from instinctively and for whom craft and emotion are more important than volume, The Delgados, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, The Flaming Lips, PJ Harvey, The Coral, REM, Calla, Arab Strap, Wheat, Radar Brothers, Canyon, The Black Heart Procession, Bright Eyes…