MC Honky
I Am the Messiah
(spinART)

The audience at the Eels' recent Boston concert was amped, having progressively warmed up as old favorites were rolled out in serial and detonated with just the right mix of rage and crafty pop appeal.

It was time for the band's frontman, E, to break it down and tell the audience that tonight — in harmony with his own atypically good mood — everybody had to treat themselves right.

"It's important that you do something nice for yourself tonight," he said, with a deadpan earnestness that contradicted the previous 60 minutes of hard rockin' rock. "It's finally time to go out and buy yourself that sweater you keep looking at in the shop window, the one you always say is just too expensive."

Go buy yourself a sweater? What kind of rock show is this?

It's an Eels show, of course, where the audience, firmly braced for this type of thing, laughs and applauds for E's touchingly sardonic foray into sensitivity.

Moodily hiding behind a Unabomberesque facade of dark glasses and facial hair, the Eels frontman is the Richie Tenenbaum of rock, by turns moody, hilarious and angry.

And he's also pulling a musical Tony Clifton act of grand proportions, because in addition to his Eels work, he's almost certainly masquerading as the aged white-guy techno wizard of beats, MC Honky.

Puffing a pipe and cautiously handling the turntables like someone's diligent middle-aged dad, MC Honky opened for the Eels with a vanilla-smooth blend of techno, presented with a liberal does of befuddled puttering.

His sound sports some serious trip-hoppy grooves, but also draws deeply from the sample-plus-melody well of early '90s rave standards like Praga Khan, Messiah and the Shamen. It's a step back from the overwhelming hip-hop influence that dominates much of modern electronica, and even the more downbeat tracks sport an innocent, playful clarity that hearkens back to a more blissed-out era of digital dance music.

MC Honky's debut disc, I Am the Messiah, leads with an Ivan Brunetti-illustrated animated video for "Sonnet No. 3 (Like a Duck)." The track is a strong start to a generally robust and varied album, compounding horn-propelled Latin rhythms, distorted vocals, and a party vibe worthy of Deeelite into a potent — hell, potentially explosive — mixture. "Daddy likes to rock," its anchoring sample, may as well be MC Honky's official slogan; while carefully cultivating his aged, almost Iowan image, he also tears up the turntables while crafting Skippy-peanut-butter-sweet soundscapes.

Later tracks live up to "Sonnet No. 3's" promise; "The Object" blends an electronic flute, a hypno-therapy sample and a fantastic sped-up vocal to create an experience as viscerally amusing and danceable as anything ever spun under a tent in the British countryside. "Baby Elephant Rock-A-Bye" has a soulful, gospel sound that evokes Moby's best work on Play, and "The Baby That Was You" is incredibly warm, and gentle enough to play for an infant.

So if the music stands up, why the subterfuge? Well, it's entertaining; the Eels website had made wonderful fun (and a bit of publicity) by hyping the E/MC Honky feud, and the mystery makes for a great live show. But it's still sort of a shame that MC Honky is under such deep cover; sound this sweet isn't something you should hide.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)