This project is essentially a comprehensive heartbreak record, executed in the inimitably laconic Everett style. There is the subtle implication of the cover and title that the subject matter will predominantly feature a man coming to terms with getting old and facing the end of life, but the meat of the album is rather more interested in dealing with the emotional effects of a break-up than with such trivial concerns as, like, ya know, death.

End Times is replete with the sort of melodramatic hyperbole that anyone who has been through a messy separation will be uncomfortably familiar with; Mark compares the plight with the doom-mongering proclamations of a street preacher on the title track and, slightly alarmingly, with a suicide bomber on Paradise Blues. Having said that, in the latter he does point out that the whole idea is “some crazy-ass shit”, and in any case the extreme analogies actually serve to match the tenor of a break-up pretty well, revealing the despondent mind-set of the newly-single narrator; “She’s gone – end times are here”.

This record is at its most appealing in the mellow, slow-tempo numbers which form the bulk of album. Particularly resonant are In My Younger Days, A Line in the Dirt, and Little Bird. The more hyperactive Gone Man and Unhinged don’t quite manage to strike the same chord, though they aren’t complete failures by any means.

The arrangements are as sweet and measured as you would expect from an Eels record with imaginatively-titled album opener, The Beginning, setting things up well with gentle guitar-picking and delicate organ music. Sometimes words are unnecessary to convey the magnitude of what is being felt, with brief interlude High and Lonesome demonstrating more anguish in 67 seconds of rain, thunder, bell-tolling and footsteps than most artists can articulate in a whole career of inane verbosity.

Mark Everett retains the trademark ability to tug at the heart-strings with his lyrics, not that there was ever any anxiety that he might have lost it. He delves into the loneliness of isolation, the nostalgia for past glories and the depressing barriers to communication on Nowadays; “The truth is something no-one really wants to hear you say”. As if to underline how openly personal and honest he is on this record, in I Need a Mother he says, “I need a mother, I’m sorry but it’s true / I need a lover, not someone like you”.

Nasty and unsympathetic as this might sound, it should be fervently hoped that E continues to be heartbroken. The quality of his output is dramatically more impressive when he is in such a psychological nadir.

Don’t ever change, Mark; stay as fantastically messed-up as you are right now.

- Sebastian Clare