EUREKA MACHINES are snappily-dressed devotees of eight to the bar riffing. They are chorus-hungry, full-on merchants of medicine-show values. They use as much smoke, as many mirrors and cheeky grins as are needed to brighten up a wet day. They are part of no movement and no trend. What they seem to have set themselves up to do is to play and record a timelessly mythical kind of innocent rock and roll that you think you have heard a million times before, even though you haven’t, and even though you couldn't positively identify any previously-known DNA in any given phrase.
The only question that matters is "do you like it?" And the answer, of course, is that it's entirely up to you. What you hear, given the clear-as-a-bell production, is what you get (or not if you're a grumpy sod). If you want to have a good time; to shout along, to throw yourself about and thrill to the harmonies and the riffs then Eureka Machine create just the gig and just the album you've been looking for.
If you're looking for something a bit more meaningful, exploratory or post-structural then you can have that instead. Personally I'm happy to get those things as well, from other bands. As a W&H review said of an earlier work, EUREKA MACHINES (Chris Catalyst, Wayne Insane, Davros and Pete Human) are nice guys putting on a show. They have their pop hearts on their suited sleeves and they know their way around a Thursday night gig in Hull or Swansea. Front man Chris Catalyst is a gigging machine all by himself. Solo or in a string of working bands (from The Sisters of Mercy to The Scaramanga Six and The Ginger Wildheart Band) he learns or writes the tunes and roars through them as if it was his life's work. Which it is.
Highlights of this album? The pp piano reprise at the very end of "Break Stuff" followed immediately by the massive chords that start "Eternal Machines". That is good melodrama. They are channelling Meatloaf in a Leeds Festival body. "We sing the songs that nobody sings!" It’s a very knowing nostalgia, only possible because it's a life they are living and a world they have known from their earliest days up North.
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Another? The stomping introduction to "Pop Star" that proves that the 1970s weren't all bad. More? The soaring bass line at the beginning of "Love Yourself" Or how about a string of words in "Affluenza" (what a great title that is) "Homogenise my life supplies with tasteless polystyrene highs". Or the horn section with its shoulders behind the juggernaut chord shifts of "None Of The Above". I also love the biting guitar line on "Living in Squalor". And the mighty pompous fanfare that opens "Eternal Machines" (a kind of autobandography that succinctly expresses everything I have just written, but with style.)
The album was financed through Pledge Music, with fans of the band quintupling its production target. 10% of all those funds have gone to the support fund for Tim (Cardiacs) Smith
http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/eurekamachines
It can also be bought online from the band's shop:
http://www.eurekamachines.com
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