Shootenanny!

No one can accuse Eels’ main man, E (born Mark Oliver Everett), of shying away from life’s ugliness. Having already covered cancer and suicide in previous efforts, it’s only natural that E would take murder for a spin, as he does here on his fifth album. “When I was born, the doctor said/There’s something wrong inside that baby head,” he sings to open the album, consciously goofing on Muddy Waters–style Chicago blues and setting the stage for the slow descent into madness that follows. But it’s a pleasant trip. On “Good Old Days,” E cushions superdepressing lyrics (“These could be the good old days”) with a serene acoustic guitar refrain. His painful heartbreak in “Dirty Girl” is couched in jaunty, upbeat guitar-pop hooks. His real accomplishment, though, is capturing the humanity and, daresay, the romance in the mind of a killer, drawing the listener into this mad, mad world until it makes a chilling amount of sense.