Eels - Tomorrow Morning (LP)

By the time Eels reached Tomorrow Morning, Mark Oliver Everett had already walked us through two very different rooms in the same house. Hombre Lobo chased desire with ragged fuzz, then End Times sat with heartbreak and quiet wreckage. Tomorrow Morning, released August 24, 2010 on E’s E Works imprint with U.S. distribution through Vagrant, turns the lights back on. It is the hopeful final chapter of the trilogy, and it leans into pulsing electronics, bright keys, and a looser, open-hearted feel. If End Times felt like a long night, this one really does sound like sunrise.

You can hear that promise right away. The short prologue In Gratitude for This Magnificent Day sets a tone of small, hard-won wonder, then the record starts to gleam and twitch with machine beats, soft synths, and E’s familiar sandpaper whisper in front. Tomorrow Morning isn’t an EDM detour so much as a recalibration. E has always used texture as a storytelling tool, and here the sequencers and drum programs serve the writing, offering a different kind of warmth than the tube-amp growl that defined the previous two installments.

Spectacular Girl is the gateway song. It has a buoyant, almost lullaby lilt, and E’s delivery walks the line between wide-eyed and wary, which is his sweet spot. I’m a Hummingbird is another keeper, delicate and slightly surreal, a reminder of how well he can pull meaning from small images. Looking Up closes the album with organ swells, claps, and an uncomplicated message that somehow lands without sentimentality. After the scorched-earth confessions of End Times, a song that just beams feels radical.

Part of the pleasure here is how handmade it all sounds, even when the drum machine is doing the counting. E has long been a self-reliant studio tinkerer, and Tomorrow Morning doubles down on that intimacy. The vocals sit close. The synth tones are simple, almost toy-like at times, and that choice puts the writing forward. What I Have to Offer, for instance, is spare and direct, almost a mission statement. E is not trying to impress with arrangement fireworks. He is trying to talk to you face to face.

Critics clocked the pivot. Reviews in places like Pitchfork and The Guardian noted the shift toward electronic color and the album’s modest, affirmative spirit, and the set landed in that “generally favorable” zone that has followed Eels through most of their career. Fair enough. Tomorrow Morning isn’t built for immediate fireworks. It rewards repeat listens, especially if you take it as the capstone to the narrative that began in 2009. Heard that way, the little melodic reprises and lyrical callbacks start to sound like sutures pulling the whole thing together.

It also works on its own, as a late-summer Eels record you can actually put on in the morning. E’s voice still scratches at the edges, and the arrangements still make space for shadows. But the record refuses to wallow. Even the more skeletal pieces feel like stepping-stones rather than sinkholes. That perspective shift makes Tomorrow Morning a sleeper favorite for fans who love the bruised tenderness of Electro-Shock Blues and the craft of Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, but want a lighter touch.

If you collect Eels vinyl, this is one that sneaks up on you with time. The production’s small details, from the gentle stereo panning to the soft attack on the keys, really bloom on a turntable. I’ve seen Tomorrow Morning vinyl come and go in shop bins, and it tends to be one of those sleeves you flip past, then circle back to when the melodies won’t leave your head. If you prefer to buy Eels records online, copies surface regularly, and it sits nicely next to other Eels albums on vinyl as the trilogy’s bright coda. Even crate diggers hunting through vinyl records Australia will often find it tucked beside End Times, a quiet little sunrise waiting for a spin.

More than anything, Tomorrow Morning feels like E refusing to let cynicism be the last word. That choice can read as unfashionable, which is part of why the album has aged well. In a catalog full of heavy weather and black humor, this record offers something rarer, the sound of someone choosing to look up and mean it.