The third installment in the Eels’ latest trilogy.
From 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 unbridled optimism, unsurprisingly, has never really 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 E stand-out, though, is his unusually fragile disposition, matched with a 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" He’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? By the fifth song in – Spectacular Girl – it actually becomes difficult to differentiate between Eels and, say, anything Beck has done since he, ah ‘matured’. Perhaps one earnest-but-formerly-kinda-daft singer who can’t decide if he’s desperate to grow old, or maintain a youthful appeal is enough.
EELS Tomorrow Morning is OUT NOW through V2 & Shock and is availble where all good chinese food is sold
