20YAT #2: Eels – Beautiful Freak
UK album chart peak: #5
“They think they've got us beat but revenge is going to be so sweet” – Pulp, Mis-Shapes
“And no one will know my name until it's on a stone” – Eels, Your Lucky Day In Hell
Beautiful Freak spent the first month of its life in the UK (it had been out in the States since the previous August) largely ignored: it debuted at a lowly 60 in the album charts, and four weeks later, continuing the recent trend for fledgling American bands to struggle in the UK during Britpop’s imperial phase, it had left the top 100 altogether. Then came the surprise hit single Novocaine For The Soul, and Beautiful Freak re-entered at number five. It would remain in the charts until October, longer than any other American rock album in 1997.
While this blog isn’t unduly bothered about commercial performance, in Beautiful Freak’s case it feels significant. Perhaps it's an overstatement to suggest that its success marks the point at which the music press’ parochial fetishisation of the UK’s own musical heritage begins to dim – after all, Blur’s noisy fifth album, in thrall to the likes of Pavement, was also imminent – but, nonetheless, with Novocaine For The Soul in particular Eels discovered a songwriting recipe seemingly precision engineered to remind the British public of the virtues of gravelly American rock music while not dragging them too far from the aesthetic of Britpop. The eccentric production, vinyl-crackle retromania and a singalong chorus was all addictively familiar; meanwhile, E’s vocal combination of throaty slacker drawl with fragile falsetto reintroduced a sobriety that had become rather snowed under in recent years.
Similarly, Susan’s House revelled in the sort of suburban minutiae that had become a Britpop staple, but the presentation is tonally different here: in place of any irony or sniggering, E offers the viewpoint of a sort of shellshocked observer – “that must be her sister — right?” – that marks him as just as much of a misfit as his subjects and, crucially, as more honest than his British peers.
Indeed, that sense of authentically downtrodden, unfashionable outsiderness marks the rest of the record, and sets it apart from other contemporary portrayals of the same characters: where Pulp’s Mis-Shapes 18 months earlier saw society’s outsiders as defiant warriors, Your Lucky Day In Hell’s version is simply resigned. Equally, Suede characterised their glamorous glue-sniffing clubbers triumphantly and inclusively as “beautiful ones”; here, almost as if in reply, Guestlist asks “Are you one of the beautiful people?” and then paints a defeatist picture of rejection as E realises that he’s not.
That a series of such earnest, quietly conscientious songs stuck around the charts for such a long time is perhaps telling: by this stage in Britpop’s lifespan, the celebratory, cocksure default was starting to grate, and Eels were among the first to arrive in opposition, offering to lance that boil of self-importance. While it wouldn’t open any floodgates stylistically – the only other American alternative rock record to have any semblance of success in 1997 was the Foo Fighters’ Color And The Shape – Beautiful Freak feels now like a proof of concept: for the first time in a while, it was possible to make an album that combined pathos, humour and sincerity, and not get laughed out of town.
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Also out this week: Reef – Glow (Sony). Chart peak #1
