Review Summary: E finally cracks a smile
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 final 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.
In the past an Eels song with a title like “I Like The Way This is Going” would be a sarcastic ode to the bittersweet; a song about being kicked when you're down and then kicked again just to be sure you felt the weight of the world asserting itself, but on
Tomorrow Morning E is no longer the miserable loner of albums past, he's finally happy, not only with who he is but with the love he has learned to find.
