2/5
End Times
Wow, Mark Everett’s had a turbulent time of it. Less than a year after the release of the relentlessly horny Hombre Lobo (accurately subtitled ‘12 songs of desire’) we have the bleak, furious End Times, a painfully personal album chronicling his divorce. And while there are many classic albums mapping the geography of a break up – Richard & Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Bright Lights, Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love and Beck’s Sea Change spring immediately to mind – End Times isn’t so much an artful expression of sorrow, anger and regret as a primal howl of pain.
The sound is as stripped down as its predecessor (recorded, in the main, on a four-track in Everett’s house), which just adds to the sense of it being the product of a friend desperately trying to stop himself going nuts after a fierce split. Many of the tracks read more like angry letters than lyrics: ‘I defy you to define me in your crazy state,’ he rasps on ‘Unhinged’; ‘You don’t know which way is up and it’s way too late.’ And that’s the album’s great weakness: there’s no doubting the strength of the emotions involved, but the lack of any editorial reflection on the lyrics and music means that End Times is filled with clunky lines and unimaginative progressions that would otherwise likely have been excised. That dead wood ultimately weakens the more powerful moments, such as ‘A Line in the Dirt’, which is as sharp a depiction of the moment of realisation as has ever been written, or the near spoken-word piece ‘Apple Trees’.
The artwork is by comic book artist Adrian Tomine (who also did the art for Electro-Shock Blues, incidentally), whose best work generally deals with relationships falling apart. End Times could have done with a little more of Tomine’s surgical precision, but in the meantime: could someone go give E a hug and tell him it’ll be okay?
Andrew P Street
In stores now.
