Eels - Tomorrow Morning

Thu 2nd Sep, 2010 in Music Reviews

By all accounts, Tomorrow Morning – Eels’ third album in twelve months – is the most upbeat of the trilogy.

This prolific recording schedule follows an award winning documentary about singer Mark Everett’s effort to discover his deceased physicist father’s contributions to that field of science. It’s well known that Everett’s parents, sister and cousin all died prematurely, and all – except for his father – within a few short years of each other, so unsurprisingly optimism has never shaped an Eels album to date.

However there’s usually enough vague sarcasm to stop the music sliding into self-pitying terrain. Mark’s almost adolescent obsession with self-analysis is still the pervading element after nine albums with Eels. Their first two albums, Beautiful Freak and Electro-shock Blues – albums concerned mainly with freakish bad fortune and self-loathing – set the tone for all future Everett records. What made Mark stand-out though is his unusually fragile disposition matched with world weariness not in line with his age.

Everett’s feelings of displacement don’t take long to emerge on Tomorrow Morning. On the single, Baby Loves Me; “The bad girls think I’m too nice/the good ones think I’m a dick…. Teacher says I’m thick” etc… Everett’s once again propelled back into the safety of teenage awkwardness – a place he all too often inhabits with Eels.

The subject matter is in good hands as far as story tellers go, but how many times have we been here? I won’t say this album completely fails to surprise though, I wouldn’t have bargained on it to begin with but, lifting the whole tone of the CD, tracks The Man, Looking Up and I Like The Way This Is Going essentially save this whole thing from a long slow slide towards pedestrian. The fact that they are almost at the album’s end is very strange, but then it appears there might be a fairly literal narrative if you read the song titles as they appear. So the slow, uncomfortable beginning is just Everett waking up and building up the courage to take on the day. He meets many challenges as the ‘day’ goes on – most of which he describes as if in a psycho therapy session – and finally he hits his stride and the “joyful”, “fun” songs burst fourth.

There are throwbacks all through to previous albums in terms of style and themes – Mr E’s Beautiful Blues from 2000’s Daisies Of The Galaxy for example would work perfectly as a conclusion to this set. Despite releasing three albums in 12 months, Everett has still played it way too safe.