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Sunday, August 23, 2009

 
So for $100, I could get my white whale, the record that I've been searching for, the one I REALLY want.

Electro-shock Blues is quite possibly my favorite album of all time. Far as I'm concerned, it's the perfect record. I'm generally not one for concept albums, I feel there's nothing more pretentious than a concept album, but this is one is fucking on. I try not to use words like emotional roller coaster to describe thing, but that's exactly what Electro-shock Blues is. If you only listen to the first half of the record and don't finish it off with the second half, you're gonna be depressed. It's guaranteed. Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor starts the album off, and it lets you know where this album is going with the final line My name is Elizabeth, my life is shit and piss, a song about E's, the singer/songwriter of The Eels, sister's suicide. I still get goosebumps every time I hear the song.

I ran into a buddy of mine at the Social D show late last month, a guy I hadn't seen in about a year and half. He told me he had gone crazy, probably aided by using drugs, from listening to the album. He told me he only listened to the first half on repeat, a true recipe for disaster. I know I told him about the album, and I'm almost positive I told him if he ever listened to it, he'd HAVE to listen to it all the way through. Don't heed my advice, it may be you on the bathroom floor, which is where he told me he wound up. I truly hope he was kidding, but I just don't know when it comes to that guy. I'm also sure that I told him about the time I listened to it one day when I got home from school when I had a particularly bad case of ennui(Maybe I had mono. That's doubtful because I didn't first kiss a girl until I was twenty, making it a little tougher to catch the kissing disease. Maybe I was just really bored.) and I slept for 15 hours straight without the aid of Nyquil. I'm pretty sure it was then that my brother told me I could no longer listen to it, nor should I ever purchase it.

My favorite song on the whole album appears during the depressing part of the album. My Descent Into Madness is actually not the one that'll throw you off the edge as the title suggests. On any given, it's very likely that if you listened to my conversations, I'll quote this song at some point. I always hope that my voice has a similar malaise to it like E's voice does, because a lot of the time I feel the way he sounds, even though I'm sure I sound nothing like him.

The second half of the album gets a little cheerier, as cheery as an album about a man's sister's suicide and his mother's lung cancer and his subsequent realization that he's the sole living member of his family can get. It really picks up at Last Stop: This Town, which is the song, I seem to recall, that piqued my brother's interest in the album originally and got him to buy it.

The last song, P.S. You Rock My World, is the reason you need to listen to the album all the way through. After everything E went through during the course of the album, it still ends with the lyric maybe it's time to live. I get goosebumps there, too.

I think $100 is too much to spend, even if it is double 10" blue vinyl, limited to 500, and the greatest record of all time.


said Tommy T. at 5:04 PM - #
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