Jim O’Rourke: Eureka

Buy in the U.S. • Buy in the U.K. • Buy in Germany • Buy in Japan

Bob Burnett: I’m glad Jim O’Rourke makes music and I’m really glad he made Eureka. On Eureka he floats into the pastoral popzone resplendant. Not just pop but at times lushy full strings and background vocalists. Sometimes I find myself humming along with this album flashing back to my mom’s light melody-following finger taps on the steering wheel of our 1968 Buick Skylark as we’d drive around the Washington, D.C. area listening to Ferrante and Teicher, 1001 Strings, Bert Kaempfert and other ooze on radio station WGAY.

Maybe I’ve gone overboard in painting this as a drippy album; maybe you think this wide-ranging artist—who is as comfortable with melody as he is with Xenakis’ concrete—is just fooling around, hoping to lure you in and then smash you with something akin to the electro-acoustic environments of his wonderfully abstract Terminal Pharmacy album.

Nah. Eureka is eureka. The melodic lushness I make such a big deal about sounds like good old solid progressive music to me. In many places it connects me to The Sea and Cake, other times I drift to little offerings of Kevin Ayers. (Okay, I will let him take a mulligan for the sax solo in “Through the Night Slowly” because it tends to mercifully go away before ruining everything. Maybe its just there to remind you that if this were a Pink Floyd album it probably would keep going, and going, and going....)

Drifting, fluid, atmospheric, poppy; Eureka is an impressive sound story.