One of the most bookish artists to rise from 90s alt-pop, Mark Everett (aka E or Eels) affects the seriocomic deadpan of Daniel Clowes, but really he's the Rick Moody of indie rock. Both are existential mopes who did their best and career-defining work in the 1990s, but have spent the better part of the last decade chasing self-indulgences, becoming too cerebral and too coldly distant to connect with an audience. Both regularly overthink their art to the point of strangling it of all life. Like Moody's new 700-page doorstop, The Four Fingers of Death, Eels' latest, Tomorrow Morning, is far too insular to mean much of anything outside itself. It's an exercise in self-referentiality, which might be more impressive if the music didn't sound like the folk-with-beats path Beck was smart enough to avoid.
Tomorrow Morning is perhaps most notable for how it complements its predecessor, the teasing End Times released earlier this year. That album showed E wrestling with his defense mechanisms in a way that promised to show the man behind the initial. He has never flinched from heavy issues; he wrote an album about cancer, after all. But he has always swathed any hint of confession in severe detachment, as if he could never wholly inhabit his songs for fear of the very real pain they might contain. Ostensibly grappling with a break-up with his longtime girlfriend, End Times toyed with expectations of autobiographical revelation, first laying out the situation in the barest lyrics possible and then twisting it into a concept album where a romantic rift brings forth an apocalypse. Musically and thematically, it spiraled out of E's control, but for a few brief moments, he became as human and as sympathetic as he had ever been.
Following just a few months later, Tomorrow Morning is the sequel that shows E recovering from his heartache and becoming a new man-- not a new musician, mind you, but a new man. He's found a new woman, and on "Baby Loves Me" and "Spectacular Girl" she gives him the power and perspective to overlook all the negativity in the world. "Baby loves me," he barks Tourettically, "and she's smarter than you." No one would begrudge him such happiness, but the song is a contrivance of burbling synths, plastic beats, and E's own dead-eyed growl. Later, on the gospel cringer "Looking Up", E declares himself transformed, but the song's so ridiculous it sounds more like a pisstake on the idea of salvation than salvation itself.
Even when he's trying to sound upbeat, E just sounds typically downhearted. That idea could be intriguing, but even if you ignore his tired delivery of lines like "I'm a hummingbird, beautiful and free," this album just sounds bad, clattering with rudimentary beats and chintzy keyboards that make the songs blur into each other. He still comes across as a bedroom auteur, shut away from the world like a DIY hermit, but aside from a bit of vinyl distortion around a few songs, the album sounds too slick to sell E's solitary stance. In that regard, the album just sounds way too long. End Times had the benefit of brevity-- just a few short songs that moved the plot out of the real world and into E's head. Tomorrow Morning, however, meanders aimlessly through 14 songs that sound like 28. How's that for existential crisis? Stuck in a never-ending Eels album.
