Going to Your Funeral Part I is the second track on Electro-Shock Blues, the second album by the alternative band Eels. Recorded during a period in which several friends and members of frontman E’s family passed away, the album is regarded to be the band’s best work because of the brutal honesty and sincerity within each of the sixteen tracks on it.

Preceding this song is “Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor“, a lullaby-like track with lyrics taken from E’s sister’s personal journal before she unfortunately ended her own life some time after. “Going to Your Funeral Part I” depicts the scene bluntly stated in the title after the tragic event. You’d think that coming right after it, it would only concern the funeral of his sister and that’s what we’re made to believe for the first and second verses, but it is only until the final verse which has E almost screaming into a megaphone about remembering an old friend he used to hang out with behind their old school.

Beginning with an ominous drone that pans from left to right and quickly fades out, the track then gets to a crawling start carried by an unsettling groove led by an intense but very slack bass line that oozes from one note to the other. E comes in with a light falsetto vocal after, but over the dark bass line and overall atmosphere still isn’t able to to make the track less dissonant than it already is. The style changes during the choruses where cute xylophones and backwards slide guitars enter the mix; those only appear for a short time before returning to the grungy sound again.

Only five minutes into the album, the listener is already provided with two tracks that sound the complete opposite to one another. Though the first hints at the unsettling feel with light music and heavy lyrics, “Going to Your Funeral Part I” really hits it home.

If you want to know why it’s specifically labelled as “Part I”, here is “Part II”.