Eels - Earth To Dora

If there’s one thing Eels’ E does better than most, it’s bring into song the kind of internal dialogue that has one awake at 3am on a Monday morning, bleary and possibly also teary-eyed (ahem). And as anyone who’s read the singer’s autobiography could attest, he’d know better than most. His designating the band’s thirteenth studio album an antidote to lockdown misery is a noble move, but mere seconds into opener ‘Anything for Boo’, in which he does, yes, in fact refer repeatedly to his “boo”, it’s clear ‘Earth to Dora’ isn’t likely to fix much. ‘Dark and Dramatic’ is neither, instead a pontification on someone else’s status; ‘Are You Fucking Your Ex’ has none of the melodrama its title suggests, the question holding about as much weight as ‘did I leave the bathroom light on?’, and ‘I Got Hurt’ sledgehammers the line “I got hurt… and it didn’t feel good”. For a songwriter who’s so loved for finding poetry in the quotidian, for saying so much with so little, it’s just a bit basic. Maybe if he’d allowed him - and us - to wallow a bit, he’d have had more of a point.