Electro-Shock Blues

the take

I should start with this. This is an album born from the painful experiences that shaped E. And the collaboration of Jim Lang and Butch. Primarily his sister’s suicide and her experiences with being institutionalized, his mother’s death and ongoing battle with terminal lung cancer, and his father’s death from a heart attack. This is a bleak and dreary album. However it ends with hope. It’s a beautiful journey. Anthony Decurtis of Rolling Stone remarked this, "Amid the corpses, however, Electro-Shock Blues is suffused with a narcissistic self-loathing that even the world's horrors don't excuse." I think he was wrong, this screams more to me a form of musical outlet. This is the process of dealing with the deaths of loved ones and finding a place and hope after they have left. This is a flawed album, but its persistence in its personal reflection of E’s pain is worth more than the album’s reception or a critic’s opinion. There is no need for an excuse when none is owed.