Lunch of Champions

EELS | Live at the Pantages

One of the great things about an Eels show is you never really know what it’s going to be like, you just know it’s going to be good. For essentially being a one-man music power-house, Mark Oliver Everett, often reffered to simply as E, has had quite a line-up of musicians playing with him. He’s played with balls-out rockers and string quartets and he’s pulled it off in small clubs and huge concert halls around the world.

Prior to the show, the audience was treated to a screening of the BBC documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, an hour-long presentation following E’s journey to try to understand his father’s contribution to the world of physics. For those unfamiliar with this story, E’s father was physicist Hugh Everett, best known as the guy who first conceived the idea of parallel worlds. Hugh’s work was initially dismissed outright and was only recognized as genius shortly before his death in 1982. I could go on about the virtually non-existent relationship between father and son, but there’s plenty to read about it online already.

While long-time fans may still be carrying a torch for his original drummer, Butch, the latest Eels incarnation is really something. The show has now been stripped down to just E and the Chet (according to E, referred to as the Chet by contractual obligation). The two super-musicians wander the stage from instrument to instrument, playing each masterfully. You will never see two men rock so hard. The true crowd-pleasing moment came when E and the Chet took turns on the same drums during the song Flyswatter, trading places without so much as missing a beat. This is a site that can not be described. Suffice to say, if you weren’t there you missed something amazing.

The show was filled with rather original bits of monologue, including E reading fan mail and reviews on stage and the Chet reading excerpts from E’s autobiography (currently only available in the UK and at concerts. I’ll write a review of it once I’ve finished). For such a reclusive man, E is truly quite witty.

The songs were mostly taken from the rather standard set of Eels tunes to appease those who came to hear the hits, but all were played (as at all Eels shows) with new and original arrangements for the die hard fans. The general mood was pushed farther towards light rock than I’d seen before, but was done expertly and kicked out enough to keep everyone in the audience happy throughout the show.

As always, the show was followed by encores until the theater lights came up and we had to go home.

Fans of Eels who missed this show, before you pull out the hari kari mat and find a friend willing to sever your head, you may want to take a road-trip to catch ‘em in another city. Even if you don’t feel you really need to see it, you’re missing out on the concert-only live CD/DVD pack at the merch booth. I’ll give that a write up too once I’ve had a chance to listen to it. That one’s taken from the Cut the Strings tour, which I thought was even better than this one.

For more tour dates and various other Eels-related news/merch/what-have-you, go to eelstheband.com.