Album Review: Being Dead – 'EELS'
A zany, psych soaked exploration.
Being Dead are a band who refreshingly don't take themselves too seriously. Their varying origin stories have been immortalised across the last seven years of making music together, and with their names Falcon Bitch and Shmoofy, they deliver each story with a wink, inviting you in on the joke. With its jangling guitars and enigmatic lyrics wailing: ‘Just when you thought you knew someone, guess again’, Being Dead take us on a psychedelic trip on album opener ‘Gorilla Rises’. Van Goes has a slightly rockabilly feel, reminiscent of their ramshackle fellow American psych punks Black Lips. Taken from a voice recording of a frustrated East Coast driver, the voice sample opening the song very much epitomises the wonderful left field zaniness of Being Dead, and their uncanny ability to find the funny in the everyday and feed it into their music.
'Firefighters' is driven by heavy guitar and abruptly leads to a sudden, drawn out silence to great dramatic effect, drawing you in with its strangeness as the vocals drift in and out, creating a disorientating yet compelling listen. 'Nightvision' conjures the confusion of waking from a vivid dream with its lucid and quite poetic lyrics: ‘Unfurling From the sea came troubled people pacing, they're pacing about, nervously complaining and turning around, glad I am awake now, ahh ahh’.
'Rock n’ Roll Hurts', despite its simple lyrics, has an unhinged haunting appeal, punctuated in the beginning with hysterical, madcap laughter. As the band evocatively describe in anticipation of its imminent release: ‘Like its animal namesake suggests, the songs on EELS are malleable, the record like slithering through murky waters or strange half dreams, mysterious and beautiful in how it moves, reflective in a wavering sheen’.‘Goodnight’ is a passionate ode to the preciousness of sleep. Sleep is the only thing more important to us than sex. This song has both”. The single perhaps best showcases the band’s exploration of opposites which gives EELS its appeal - sex and sleep, dreaming and waking - amongst others that leave so much to the imagination and take us on a journey that is hard to resist.
Words by Brendan Sharp
