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.”