When my dear mum saw the cover of this album, she made the (trite?) comment: 'Ooh, that's a very old fashioned looking sleeve!' And she was right, of course, seeing as the innocent little children and cute little dogs are painted in an idyllic, 1930s picture-book style. But open up the cover, to the next colour plate, to the left of the pretty songbirds, and you'll see two small boys with rosy cheeks and curling golden hair...carrying shotguns, out on a hunt. And look once more at the sweet little girl in the red dress on the front cover...what is she going to do with that stick? And why do the dogs look so scared?

However, they're sneaky in another way, too. Maybe it's just my depressing take on things, but read between the lines of Mr E's simple but perfectly atmospheric lyrics, past the happy, twittering birds, and there's a darker side. Let's face it, there always is with the Eels. I bought this album whilst on a long tour of the western USA and it took this to make me realise just how succinctly and perfectly E has summed up American society, albeit in a nostalgic way.

And yet in a few minutes, we’re back on track with the calmly happy Packing Blankets. It doesn’t last, though. This album is ingrained with such a deep sense of loss that it makes me feel sad sometimes just to listen to it. One of the maddest songs, ‘I Like Birds’, stops being so funny when you realise it’s a tribute to E’s late mother, who loved her feathered friends. Memory is another theme running across the record as it’s steeped in a sense of looking back to better times, while maintaining hope for the future. Amongst all the strummed guitars and chiming glockenspiels there are fuzzy, menacing baselines, e.g. on The Sound of Fear, Flyswatter and the hidden track, so the music is as close to perfectly matching the lyrics as you can get. The texture is extremely thin, but not tinny at all, with minimal backing vocals.

E certainly doesn’t embrace fame, having morphed now into someone apparently doing their best impression of the Unabomber. So it fits in well that the hit single, the song that everyone loves, isn’t even advertised on the cover! Mr E’s Beautiful Blues is just…great, no two ways about it. It’s catchy and uplifting, sing-along stuff with its chorus of ‘Goddam right, it’s a beautiful day.’ Again, is this relentless optimism (as the verses are about pollution, guns and unhappy families!) or sarcasm? I honestly don’t know, it sometimes feels more like it’s more about the attitude of American people to the flaws in their society. But enough analysis, although this is a much more complex record than its acoustic guitar and stating-the-point lyrics give away at first listen.