Eels - Tomorrow Morning Review

On Eels Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, Mark Oliver Everett let a bit of sunlight shine through the dark curtains that draped the window of his soul in the form of “Things the Grandchildren Should Know”. Having appeared to have finally come to terms with his relationship with his late father, the physicist Hugh Everett who coined the widest accepted theory on parallel universes, “E” was slowly beginning to shed his depressing world view and social presentation in favor of a more optimistic world view. So now at the dawn of his eighteenth year in the music business, E's black curtains have been torn from the wall with Tomorrow Morning. The third and finally entry in the series of releases that also contains Hombre Lobo and End Times, Tomorrow Morning is not only the close of E's love epic, it is also the culmination of the best of his near twenty year career, taking the pop chords and beautiful, yet detached, simplicity of his earliest recordings with the textural experimentation that has spawned some the most intriguing moments of Blinking Lights.

Everett has stated that Tomorrow Morning is an album of redemption, and being so it beams with a warm and understated jovial jaunt that never outlives its welcome and is omnipresent throughout the album. The low key arrangements with their delicate, minimalistic attitude and E's cool as ice voice with its distinctive nonchalance and slightly frayed edge sound even more honest than before, which is hard to believe given that E has spent his entire career plumbing the depths of his life experience with an unabashed openness. When Tomorrow Morning hits higher tempos it absolutely shines, especially the gospel tinged “Looking Up” with its distorted vocals and rapturous hand claps reaffirming the new playful side of E....full text The last of a trilogy of albums written around the time of Mark "E" Everett's divorce, Tomorrow Morning presents Everett as you've rarely heard him before: happy, fulfilled, almost optimistic. The bottomless pit of despondence that generally provides his subject matter has been supplanted by, well, not joy, exactly, but a recognition that life doesn't always suck. "For all the wear and tear, I look OK," he marvels on What I Have to Offer; on the crunchy, electro-punky Baby Loves Me, he decides that even if "the record company hates me", things are fine because "my baby loves me/ Unlikely but true". Sonically, he makes more use of electronics than usual, reaching a crescendo of chirps and drum loops on the fade-out to This Is Where it Gets Good, but he's just as likely to use a church organ or distorted guitars. An intriguing addition to the Eels canon....full text Tomorrow Morning is Eels’s third album in less than two years. It is a prolific rate, but though they are clearly enjoying themselves, there’s not much new here. Their moodily melodic, stop-start indie sound has mellowed, while troubled singer Mark Everett’s lyrics, as introspective as ever, feel a little more optimistic. “It was all worth it, to be here now”, he sings on I’m a Hummingbird. As a listener, one only just agrees....full text