Like Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, Eels mainman Mark “E” Everett is a pretty unusual guy who, for the last couple of decades, has been making fairly straighforward music. Sure, his output has dealt with some desolate themes – suicide, mental illness, terrorism, terminal disease- but Eels’ bleakness was (in the early stages of Everett’s career at least) often neatly bound up in radio-friendly, if slightly oddball, indie-pop packages like “Novocaine for the Soul“, “Susan’s House“, “Last Stop: This Town” and “Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues.”

Saliently though, that run of singles fizzles out almost 15 years ago. Eels haven’t troubled the UK Top 10 singles chart since 1997, and subsequently drifted off the radar of many casual fans in the period following their late 90s/early 00s commercial apex. The project has have never actually ceased to be a going concern for Everett, but the Virginia native has explored a variety of non-musical outlets in the 21st century, including writing an autobiography and presenting a BBC documentary on his celebrated quantum physicist father, Hugh Everett III. Nevertheless, Eels have tended to put out a new record every couple of years since the aforementioned well of hits ran dry; this is Everett’s eleventh full-length studio album fronting a constantly flexible band line-up.

The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett arrives at a critical juncture in its creator’s life, released just a couple of weeks after Everett turned fifty in April 2014. Appropriately, the opening track is entitled “Where I’m At”, the first in the album’s self-analytical triptych. As a solely instrumental number, this opening instalment doesn’t give much away as to a mindset approaching the landmark birthday, but this is not to say he shies away from addressing the passage of time on TCTOMOE. Far from it – it’s one of the album’s major topics. “As the light of day shines down, there’s no way around it – I am not a younger man” is the singer’s stark admission on “Mistakes Of My Youth.”

This record utilizes straightforward folk-rock with understated string and brass accompaniments, mostly stripped of the whimsical music box quirks of yesteryear, although “Agatha Chan” is a knowingly self-conscious attempt to emulate a lovelorn torch song a la Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.”

In terms of the lyrics, the famously gloomy Everett approaches life in conciliatory, even upbeat fashion. He resolves in the optimistic “Where I’m From” to “drink to everything that we went through/it wasn’t always so bad” and admitting to – shock horror – having a “good feeling” on the Tom Waitsian closer “Where I’m Going.” This is countered by the tortured confessions of “Kindred Spirit” in which he claims to “live every day in regret and pain”, and the familiar laments on “Gentleman’s Choice” that “the world has no room for my kind.” Angst, even of a very middle-aged kind, is still proving tough for Everett to fully let go of.