Before the tumult and heartache, things were "beautiful and free" for a brief moment at the beginning of the last EELS album, END TIMES. On that album EELS leader Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, sifted through the emotional wreckage of a romance gone wrong while living in an increasingly foreboding and unfriendly world. The follow-up to that harrowing work finds Everett not only recovered, but surprisingly invigorated -- discovering something more permanently beautiful and free in the new album's second track, "I'm a Hummingbird". The ninth EELS studio album, TOMORROW MORNING, is the brightest and most overtly uplifting work of the EELS' fourteen year career.
The final installment of a trilogy that started with 2009's HOMBRE LOBO and 2010's END TIMES (released a half year from each other), TOMORROW MORNING finishes the story on a high note. Following a four year gap between EELS studio albums, HOMBRE LOBO (June, 2009) dealt with what Everett called "The before. The hunger that starts everything." Conversely, END TIMES (January, 2010) tackled what he called "The after, and how you deal with the aftermath." TOMORROW MORNING (August 24, 2010) is "The redemption," he says. "A new beginning and another chance. The blooming of all new possibilities. The hope that was always there coming to fruition."
Unlike either the combustive garage-rock longing of HOMBRE LOBO or the stripped-down acoustic starkness of END TIMES, TOMORROW MORNING is a new musical landscape: electronic keyboards, drum machines, tape loops and found sounds. "It's a very electronic album -- sounds normally associated with a kind of 'colder' music," says Everett, "but I wanted to make a warm album that was a celebration using electronic instruments to reflect joy in the times I live in." Helping Everett bring the vibrant celebration to life are performances by longtime EELS bassist/keyboardist Koool G Murder and drummer/percussionist Knuckles, along with new EELS collaborators The Amy Davies Choir and Tomorrow Morning Orchestra. It's a bold, experimental and immediate new EELS sound. As Everett puts it, "There's a lot going on in these songs."
While END TIMES' closing track "On My Feet" found Everett hopeful for recovery, he makes it loud and clear in TOMORROW MORNING's raucous "Looking Up" that he is, indeed, very much back up and on his feet again:
Used to be kind of bitter
Always had a baby sitter
But I'm feeling much fitter
Now I'm pretty sweet
Back on my feet
Walking down the street
Now I'm oh so kind
Got no worried mind
I'm a real find
It took a little while but I'm a real fine man now
I never could but I always can now
Time has healed me
Can you feel me looking up?
"I'm just reflecting whatever is going on, be it good or bad. It's all part of life on Earth," Everett says, "and this time it's feeling good. I felt like throwing a musical birthday party for the world. END TIMES was a story that had to be told, but I always knew things were going to change." As he states in the song "Oh So Lovely":
If the grass is not greener you know what it needs
I knew that I had to throw down some seeds
Oh so lovely/Lord above me
I feel my heart changing in mysterious new ways
Hello Mark! It is an honor to have yourself of friend in myspace, I am charmed with all your music and I would be charmed with going to some your concert, but I am from Spain and since I am a minor cannot enter the rooms where vais to acting, but good I will conform to your good music and will read the book that you have published that have said to me that it is very very nice, so much as your music, a lot of luck though you do not need it, up to always!!
Saw you play a gig last thurs at Birmigham O2 Academy, it was awesome, you rocked through tracks from Prizefighter to Souljacker & one of my favorite Tremendous Dynamite, I love Eels, i have fallen in love, Peace, Love & Light Alasdair
Hey guys great show last night :) loved the cover of Summer in the City cover! :) really awesome. Got some great photos from last night. Good luck on the rest of the tour: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fallenstarphotography/sets/72157624684588961/
Your Birmingham gig was fantastic the other night! I had an absolute ball! Loved the sunshine theme and ice lollies you threw out to the crowd. It really did bring out the sunshine in our souls. Thank you xx.
