This came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Eels singer-songwriter Mark Everett had nowhere to go but up.
His last album, 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues, was the most beautiful downer of the year — a gloriously gut-wrenching musical therapy session that dealt frankly with his sister’s mental illness and suicide, his mother’s fatal battle with cancer and his struggles to get through it all. The followup Daisies Of The Galaxy is a welcome glimpse of light at the end of his long, dark tunnel. Kicked off, appropriately enough, by a New Orleans funeral band, these 15 charming slices of sweet pop, quirk-hop and hushed alt-folk — think Beck’s mellower, moodier moments — appreciate little miracles like birds, flowers and beautiful days in the way only a man who’s eyeballed death truly can. E still has his shaky moments — “I think I’m on the brink of disaster,” he warns in Tiger In My Tank. But as he says himself on Grace Kelly Blues, “I think you know I’ll be OK.” Glad to hear it, E. Onward and upward.
