Cookies Happened Album Review by Rob Johnson
Eels, the collective band name for Mark ‘E’ Everett and whatever collection of reprobates he has summoned to play alongside him that month, have never been an act to rest on their laurels. And so, less than two years after their critically acclaimed 15th album Eels Time!, we have a new record in the shape of Cookie Happened, the band’s 16th record and the first to be named after a quote from that great philosopher of our times, the Cookie Monster (the quote: ‘Me no cry because cookie is finished. Me smile because cookie happened’).
The album kicks off with ‘Clobbered’, a song packed full of layered instrumentation and competing melodies all set to Everett’s gloomy lyrics. The combination of upbeat music and downbeat lyrics has long been Eels signature style, perhaps inspired by Tom Waits immortal line ‘I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.’ It’s a typical Eels song in that there is a vague sense that you’ve heard it before but it is still rather lovely.
‘Cap in Hand’, the lead single and one of Everett’s best compositions for years, is truly vintage Eels. It’s a boxcar ballad from a ‘broken man who’s picking up the pieces’, a forlorn and affecting slice of melancholia that still has an irresistible groove running through it because this is a band that writes catchy melodies almost in spite of itself. It’s all Everett knows. ‘All Forgotten’ continues in this vein with the band in typically introspective mood (‘sometimes life can be so strange’). Now well into his sixth decade, Everett’s weathered and world-weary voice matches his battle-scarred world view. Crucially, however, even the band’s darkest moments tend to contain at least a shred of hope in there somewhere.
EelsEven as he’s singing ‘there’s a sucker born every minute, happy birthday to me’ on ‘Bamboozled Again’, you can almost hear the twinkle in Everett’s eye. The piano led ‘Taking Pictures’ is sonically similar to Eels favourites ‘I Need Some Sleep’ and ‘It’s a Motherfucker’, whilst still sounding like a band moving forward rather than relying on the same tired old formula. I suppose you simply don’t get to record 16 albums if you’ve nothing left to say.
Unsurprisingly for a man of his age (hey, I’m not far behind you, old chap), Cookie Happened has a preoccupation with ageing. ‘New Story’ has Everett proclaiming ‘no wonder that I feel so old, and every day is such a grind’ and as this has always been a band that have seemed old before their time, this fixation on mortality fits like a battered and torn old glove. ‘Congratulations to Me’ sees Eels channelling their incredible (and overlooked) live album Eels with Strings with lush orchestration as Everett reminds himself (and us) that ‘there’s no time left to waste/before I leave this place’. It’s sad and wistful and effective and it just works. Somehow, even as the band enter their fourth decade, it still just works.
‘One Razzle, One Dazzle’ again evokes Waits and his obsession with the crooners of the ‘40s and ‘50s. It’s almost an Irish drinking song in its arrangement and its refrain ‘I’ll get by, one razzle, one dazzle, at a time’. It’s an album highlight. ‘I’m On Standby’ repurposes the riff from ‘Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues’ from Daisies of the Galaxy into something a little more mature (if less exciting) before the album closes out with ‘Dum Dums’, a typically idiosyncratic but beautiful acoustic number and ‘The Way I Was Made’, a straight up love song, something that Everett has always had in his locker. This is one of his best. Intimate. Soulful. Moving. But still very much him.
Despite the fact that this is an album clearly recorded by a man reckoning with his mortality and his legacy, it’s still an absorbing and entertaining listen. Beautiful melodies telling us terrible things… this guy gets it.
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