Elvis Costello and Eels: the beauty of the flayed

(Paris) Lives and voices full of splinters for a discography with beautiful ramifications: Englishman Elvis Costello and the group Eels find the spark of their beginnings with discs released in the first weeks of 2022.

The two men (Eels is a front group for its creator Mark Oliver Everett, a major figure in the American alternative scene) have a lot in common, starting with scratched vocal cords.

“Their voice is not very conventional in the history of rock, they created a place for themselves by swimming against the tide, no one was expecting them”, portrayed for AFP Michka Assayas, author of a dictionary of rock reference.

No one predicted such longevity either.

The boy named ifpublished in mid-January, is 32^and studio album by Elvis Costello, which first appeared on record in 1977 (My love is true). Here it is almost up to the productivity of a Bob Dylan (39 studio discs). extreme witchcraftthis Friday, is the 14^and opus of Eels, appeared in the radars in 1996 with the album beautiful freak.

“Costello said it, he thought he would just ride a carousel in the 1970s, then do something else, with his ugly classy physique,” ​​recalls Michka Assayas, laughing.

We are also far from the look of the ideal son-in-law with Mark Oliver Everett. The American, who names his group Eels, hides behind a scruffy beard and crudely layered sunglasses and eyesight.

“Screeching people”

Their texts are in keeping. “These are people who creaked,” summarizes Michka Assayas, host on France Inter radio.

Novocaine for the Soul, early success of Eels, sings of a quest for drugs to relieve discomfort. As for Costello (Declan Patrick MacManus, on his English birth certificate), if his music revisits the canons of rock from the start, it is punk that transpires from his attitude. “His anger set him apart,” summarizes Michka Assayas.

Costello “resents the whole world” by landing in showbiz, “the girls of the magazines who snub him” as well as “the groupies who are too easy”, writes Philippe Manoeuvre in his Ideal rock disco.

Costello scratched the start of his professional and romantic career with chaotic tours between drugs and alcohol, before calming down alongside the jazz diva Diana Krall. The sexagenarian is done with the excesses.

Eels’ life is marked by death. That of his father, whose lifeless body he discovered at the age of 19, of a sister who had committed suicide, of his mother struck down by cancer, or of a cousin who had disappeared in one of the hijacked planes of September 11.

“Mad Scientist”, “Mister Hyde”

But the two artists transform the poison of their existence into a musical elixir — Costello has recovered from cancer.

As evidenced by their latest deliveries. “They are both classic and personal, traditionalist and modern, in the reinvention of rock”, unfolds Michka Assayas.

Landfills Farewell, Okay and amateur hour open the respective albums of Costello and Eels, which then offer a nice range of atmospheres. To surround themselves, they reactivated old connections.

The Englishman has returned to The Imposters, his original group The Attractions, except for one musician. Enough to make his pen nostalgic, as Costello explains in the notes of a disc which “takes us from the last days of an unfettered childhood until that mortifying moment when you are asked to stop driving like a kid”.

The American from Eels reminded him of John Parish, guitarist and producer with whom he worked on Souljacker (2001). Parish, a musician of exquisite “politeness” outside the studios, but who, once inside, becomes a “mad scientist”, a “Mister Hyde” according to Eels. Multiple personalities ideal for “Extreme Witchcraft”.