Estate Sale (Eels)

Daisies of The Galaxy, the third album by California-based rock band Eels, is an enigma, a collection of predominantly upbeat-sounding tunes bubbling along atop a barely-concealed undercurrent of despair. Even the cover of the album seems purposely designed to throw us off. Ostensibly, it has the benign appearance of an illustration taken from an old-fashioned children's storybook, with the image of a group of four children offering two dogs a stick against a the idyllic backdrop and soft colours of a placid lakeside residence. All sense of childhood bliss and innocence is immediately disturbed, however, by that parental advisory sticker in the top right corner (there is a track entitled "It's A Motherfucker" in the listings, after all), prompting us to look again at the image. We begin to suspect that there is a darker significance to this picture that's perhaps not apparent at first glance; that, much like that pristine blue lake in the background, something far more unsavoury may be lurking beneath the surface. On second glance, the way in which all four children stand close together gives them the appearance of a gang looming threateningly above the pint-sized pups. The manner in which the tallest girl is directing her stick toward the dogs seems more hostile than playful, suggesting that she intends to prod the dogs with the stick, not throw it for them. The dogs, for their part, do not appear excited or reassured by the presence of the children, but unsettled and intimidated. Suddenly, the smiles of those rosy-cheeked cherubs become the faces of cruelty, sadism and unchecked rambunctiousness (all of which are as characteristic of childhood as carefree games of tag and stickball). It's an image infused with nostalgia, but also unease, as if purposely contemplating some of the less agreeable recesses of childhood.

Of course, it becomes difficult to delve particularly far into Eels' discography without acknowledging the personal tragedies experienced by E (aka Mark Oliver Everett) between the release of Beautiful Freak in 1996 and the band's sophomore album Electo-Shock Blues in 1998. Within that time, E lost both his sister and his mother (his father having already died when E was a teenager) and found himself very suddenly the last surviving member of his immediate family. As a result, loss and loneliness are two themes that have continued to pervade Eels' work, although compared to the downbeat, reflective anguish of Electro-Shock Blues, Daisies of The Galaxy finds E in a beguilingly poppy mood. He's a survivor, but a survivor who understands all too well that the road to recovery is not a linear path. The aforementioned "It's A Motherfucker" deals the most explicitly with bereavement, while others, such as the buoyantly ironic "Mr E's Beautiful Blues" (which became the album's lead single), take a more sardonic view on the complexities of rising to face a new day.

The most intriguing track on Daisies of The Galaxy is "Estate Sale", a short piece, barely more than a minute and a half long, on which E's vocals are conspicuously absent and a jumbled assortment of voices, familiar yet strangely disconcerting, are heard in their place. Ostensibly, "Estate Sale" is about nostalgia; the first voice we hear informs us that, "These are the sounds of days that are past". Then another: "A miracle was about to happen." One alludes to a bygone era, the other refers to a future event, although the tense clearly places the pending miracle within the context of the past. The two voices are likely to strike a chord with those armed with a thorough knowledge of 20th century Americana - the first is that of broadcaster and war correspondent Edward R. Murrow, and is sampled from the opening to Murrow's 1948 spoken word record I Can Hear It Now.... The second voice belongs to a classic icon of many a mid-century childhood, Wilma Flintstone (more accurately, it's Jean Vander Pyl, but here she is in character as Wilma). There is a warmth and geniality to both of the voices, and yet "Estate Sale" is not a cosy listen. The voices are interspersed amid an elegiac organ melody, reminiscent of the kind of mournful, reflective music one would typically encounter at a funeral ceremony. The spectre of death hangs over it - the very title "Estate Sale" is disturbing, calling to mind an event designed to sell off the possessions of a deceased person, else one who needs to uproot their life rapidly. Once again, we are prompted to reevaluate what Eels intends for us to take from from this scenario. With its morbid undertones, "Estate Sale" feels less like the nostalgic yearning for a bygone time than it does flat-out haunted - the "sounds of days that are past" become the voices of something dead and ostensibly buried that continues to whisper to us, not necessarily amicably, from beyond the earthly realm. What kinds of ghosts haunt our "Estate Sale"?

"Estate Sale" is one of Eels' most Boards of Canada-esque tracks, combining a fascination with retro technology (the vinyl crackle, which reinforces that same uneasy schism between nostalgia and perturbation; at once warm and vintage while carrying a disconcerting association with estrangement and distortion) with cut-up audio samples from various, vaguely familiar sources to convey a sense of childhood innocence disturbed or disrupted. "Estate Sale" certainly has an interest in the artifacts of childhood; amid the voices heard jabbering faintly throughout the latter half of the track, for the most part barely discernible, one can very clearly pick out the word "Bambi" a couple of times. Only that's not dialogue from the Disney film. That's actually Wilma Flintstone again. Bambi, the world's most famous fictional cervine by a county mile, is another enduring icon of childhood, and while Disney's depiction of Bambi has continued to dominate the public's perception of the character since the debut of the animated classic in 1942, he started life in 1923 as the brainchild of Austrian author Felix Salten, who first wrote about the sprightly fawn in the children's novel, Bambi, a Life in The Woods. There have been a number of adaptations of Salten's book besides the Disney version, including a live action Russian film in 1985, and a spoken word record narrated by Wilma Flintstone, dialogue from which is featured prominently throughout "Estate Sale".

Wilma Flinstone Tells The Story of Bambi was released by Hanna-Barbera Records in 1965 as part of a wider series of spoken word recordings in which various Hanna-Barbera characters plundered the public domain for familiar tales and narrated them with their own individual twists (actually, the extent to which Bambi is to be considered public domain has been the subject of drawn-out legal dispute in the US - the short of it is that, as of writing, it is not considered public domain in the US, but the American copyright is set to expire in 2022). Other titles within the same series had Huckleberry Hound narrating the story of Brer Rabbit and The Tar Baby, Yogi Bear narrating Little Red Riding Hood (yes, pic-a-nic baskets, very apt), Mr Jinks narrating Cinderella and Johnny Quest narrating Jules Verne's seminal science fiction classic 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I note that these were largely stories that Disney had already covered, although Top Cat's version of Robin Hood beat out Disney's take on the legend by several years.

The set-up of the record has Wilma telling the story of Bambi to Pebbles and Bam-Bam in order to teach them about empathy and sensitivity after observing their rough treatment of family pet Dino. Despite the comic framing narrative, Wilma's take on Salten's story is played entirely straight (yes, Bambi's mother still dies in this version) and as a result the record does come off as sincere in its message about treating all living creatures with respect. Incidentally, if you think the whole idea of a prehistoric cavewoman telling a story that wouldn't be published until 1923 is kind of suspect, then loosen up. Hanna-Barbera lived by different rules.

The following audio samples in "Estate Sale" were taken from Wilma Flintstone Tells The Story of Bambi:

• 0:16 - "A miracle was about to happen."
• 0:28 - Birdsong is heard.
• 0:33 - A tapping noise (the sound of a woodpecker relating a coded message) is heard.
• 1:01 - The following extract plays out:

"What are you gonna name him?" asked the squirrel.

"I think I'll call him Bambi," answered the mother deer.

"Bambi, huh? That's perfect! It just sounds like a cute little deer - like Bambi!" (Squirrel laughs)

Being only a few hours old, Bambi wasn't too strong..."

(Note: although Vander Pyl provided most of the dialogue on this recording, the squirrel's helium vocals came courtesy of Dick Beals.)

There is at least one other audio sample, also a female voice, that's interspersed with the above extract. For the most part, this is too muted for me to make out, although at 1:07 I can clearly hear the word "sacrifice" and at 1:20 the statement "And so it is..." That statement, coupled with the solemnity of the woman's voice leads me to suspect that the recording may be religious in nature, although obviously I cannot say for certain.

The appearance of a chopped up children's story in such a downbeat, disconcerting track is itself unsettling, for it is evocative of the lost childhood innocence that haunts so many Boards of Canada compositions, perhaps made all the more salient here by the notoriety of its protagonist. After all, no fictional character encapsulates a sense of shattered childhood innocence more succinctly than Bambi. When you hear the name "Bambi", you might instantly picture the cute, doe-eyed fawn of the Disney canon, but odds are that your mind eventually wandered to the unfortunate rite of passage that Bambi is made to endure before reaching adulthood and assuming his place as Prince of the Forest. When the squirrel shrieks his name twice in the above audio sample, there's a sense of immediate familiarity, but also ominousness. We all know Bambi, and we know what's coming to him (or at least to his mother). "Estate Sale" trades on the character's powerful cultural currency. Meanwhile, I am conscious of the fact that, at the time of Daisies of The Galaxies' release in February 2000, Jean Vander Pyl herself was still less than a year deceased. A familiar voice that had entertained children for close to four decades was now officially consigned to the past, and through the recordings she left behind, Vander Pyl effectively was speaking to us from beyond the grave. Amid the cut-up, only partially intelligible audio is the doleful sense of a legacy on the cusp of fading into memory.

The title "Estate Sale" is indicative of the track's conflicted relationship with these lingering spectres. It conjures up images of the earthly possessions of the dead or destitute being offered up for harvest by the public, to be scavenged through like so many vultures picking at the bones of a decomposing gazelle carcass, as their former owner's legacy, reduced to a musty collection of material debris, is slowly pulled apart and disintegrates. It is a dispiriting scenario, and yet an estate sale also offers the opportunity for change, a chance to shed oneself of worldly clutter, and all of the emotional baggage that goes with it, and to start anew elsewhere (Bambi is, above all, a story of resilience and renewal). Listening to "Estate Sale", one comes away with the impression that the subject of this particular estate sale, whether real or metaphorical, wishes to be rid of these spectres but at the same time cannot bear to part with them. The track plays like a rumination on the paradoxes of psychic debris, the voices of yore squirreled away from various points across our lifetimes that serve to intermittently disturb our footing the present; faded and broken and yet persistent, as fondly reassuring as they are coldly alienating. Perhaps the most troubling paradox of all is the sense of stagnation mixed with slow decay; the subject is seemingly stuck with their personal debris, regarded by the scavenging public with total indifference, and yet this is not something fixed and reliable - those ghosts continue to linger, but we can hear the process of time working away at them, causing their voices to become gradually more estranged and indistinct. Furthermore, Eels appear to be making a point about the ultimate nature of legacy, for inevitably our memory too will be nothing more than fragmentary chunks for scavengers to take from what they will, or else leave discarded in a mildew-ridden heap. If there's one really crucial lesson to be taken from our cervine chum Bambi, aside from the one Wilma Flintstone identifies, it's that everything has its time.