The Eels Pack the Showbox

We were quite surprised last week when we found out that The Eels had sold out the Showbox at the Market for their Friday appearance. Perhaps we've been living under a rock; as far as we were concerned, The Eels were nothing more than a one-hit wonder from the mid-1990s, when their single "Novocaine for the Soul", off of 1996's Beautiful Freak, starting climbing the modern rock charts. There were a couple tasty follow-ups, like "Your Luck Day in Hell", but more or less we figured they'd gone the way of The Toadies and other break-out acts that seemed to fall off the face of the earth.

Instead, upon entering the Showbox, we found the house packed with the band's ardent followers. Arriving a bit late (we'd assumed there were openers), we caught a bit of the tail end of a film which follows lead-singer Mark Oliver Everett's attempts to track the life of his father, who was apparently the minor physicist Hugh Everett III, notable for his theory of multiple universes. (It's the Schrödinger's cat paradox thing, which Everett proposed could be solved if their were multiple universes representing all possible eventualities, made popular in science fiction; The Believer actually had an essay on him several months ago.)

The performance itself was also a departure from the expected. The band we recall was an art-pop trio willing to use a xylophone. But here was Mark Everett onstage with a small orchestra. Apparently things have changed since the Beautiful Freak days, which encourages us to check out later albums like Souljacker and Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. Still, the show closed in predictably rocking fashion by the time they got to "Novocaine." It was a strange look into the life of a little band we never thought to hear from again, but not an unpleasant one.