Four years ago, Eels frontman and songwriter E (Mark Oliver Everett) penned a collection of intimate, revealing songs called “Blinking Lights” that reflected personal experience and the human spirit. In many ways “Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire” is its mirror image, but one focusing more on animal instinct. This beautifully crafted, stripped-down recording showcases once more that E uses searing honesty and a canny sense of pop, rock, blues and everything else to chronicle his own strange path through life. After a rocking first half, the disc settles down into nakedly sensitive, embarrassingly frank ballads beginning with the self-explanatory wish revealed in “That Look You Give That Guy”.
by Mark Emge
