Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Before Mark Oliver Everett started the Eels, he released two albums under his moniker E on Polydor records: 1992's  A Man Called E and 1993's  Broken Toy Shop . Both are long out of print, and this is a shame because they both reach the level of excellence of his later work in the Eels.  Both albums are chock full of E's wry sense of humor and penchant for self-deprecation. They also look ahead to his love of peculiar instrumentation and experimentation with programming. One quick takeaway is that E loves glockenspiel, melodica, and accordion. He plays many of the instruments on these records himself, building an atmosphere of longing and regret amidst a foundation of catchy melodies. However, the records do feel more traditional and warmer than most of the Eels catalog.  A Man Called E quickly prepares the listener for E's worldview with a pair of songs that privilege his outsider status ("Hello Cruel World," "Fitting in with the Misfits") while ack...

I've been a Clem Snide fan for a long time, enamored with Eef Barzelay's easy, literate lyrics and the band's indie country shuffle. They have released a number of solid albums over the years, and have now turned to putting them out digitally, recently releasing several fan chosen collections of covers. For my money the best albums are Soft Spot and End of Love , although I know that The Ghost of Fashion and Your Favorite Music are strong contenders. Eef's solo records present other sides of his songwriting that have been making their way into the later band output. The first is contemplative, while the second rocks like nothing else he has done. For this edition of Track This, I wanted to review a track from his solo albums but had trouble picking one, so I chose two. The musically upbeat, yet lyrically down, "Could Be Worse" from Lose Big and the Rocket Science soundtrack cut, "I Love the Unknown." Both recognize Barzelay's ability to...

The other day when I was writing the "Track This" for Jawbox's "Cooling Card," something jogged my memory about music magazines I had read in my formative years, particularly those published while I was still in High School. Many, if not most, of them are gone now. They gave way to blogs and online publications. These include zines like Flipside , which covered mainstream and underground bands -- they also had some of my favorite columnists of all time, Punk Planet , which ventured further into Indie rock as it progressed, and MRR , which is still going strong. The magazines that I read often included Alternative Press and Magnet , as well as Ray Gun Publishing's huH which turned me on to a ton of great music because it included a cd with each issue that served as a sampler for what had been released that month, divided by genre. While other magazines did this, huH undoubtedly was more inclusive in the types of bands these cds covered. In fact, these col...

When I was in High School, I was addicted to the Eels. Their combination of maudlin lyrics and E's world weary vocals really touched me. I fell in even deeper when Mark Oliver Everett slowed back down and started making records that were more similar to his first solo records, A Man Called E and Broken Toy Shop . But there was something about that first album; it rocked, while speaking particularly to my teenage frame of mind. I wanted to hide in my room all the time, cranking music that mirrored my angst. When I feel this way now, I just put Beautiful Freak on and hide for a few hours, even though my head is in a much better place. The album asks for, but also acts as shelter against the arrows and slings of the outside world. Its loud moments are always tempered by slower sections, where E sings his heart out in a primal call to arms. In "Not Ready Yet," E sings, "If I leave my room, don't you tell me to lighten up / Maybe sometime sooner or later / But I ...