Artist: Digitalia Records
Album: O Utopia
I like to think I'm well-balanced enough to accept that music is generally a matter of personal preference. If someone fails to find something in releases I recommend to them, I can generally greet this with equanimity Why, then, do I find myself listening to O Utopia and thinking that, if you don't find yourself instantly falling for its charms, there must be something very wrong with you?
If that sounds like Eureka Brown's music has brought out my intolerance demons, that couldn't be further from the truth. There's an easy charm about this album that, even in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary, astonishingly manages to reassure me that the world is essentially a good place.
The reason for this is, I suppose, that the album's upbeat quirkiness manages to take apart and put back together that world in so many pleasing ways you're drawn into something that resembles a far more satisfying place to live. Sometimes it does this, as in the case of 'Hush Hush', by settling into such a reassuringly lovable groove that the spikily intrusive guitar that comes in at one point soon falls victim to that groove and settle peaceably into it.
Or sometimes the inclination is to throw a whole melee of sounds together that ought to sound like a disparate mess but which somehow creates some kind of wondrous balance between dissonance and harmony. 'The whole caboodle's going down the tubes,' he sings on 'Shebang', following the line with a scratchy mock-fanfare that's part celebratory, part twisted sonic meddling.
I play 'We're All Gonna Die' in my Dandelion Radio show this month, its calmly enunciated statement on the inevitability of death failing to shake off the album's general feel good vibe even as it consigns us all to dust.
Somehow, I get the impression that Eureka Brown isn't one to judge you over all this, but I will: you are incomplete without this album. - Unwashed Territories
It's just the fifth album with a hologram etched into it by Duke, who invented the process. The other albums include one by Jack White and the new "Star Wars" soundtrack, which was unveiled in London. Duke attended that event.
The Bauer album, released on his Digitalia Records label, was mastered by Jonathon Pines at Private Studios in Urbana and includes Bauer's arrangement of "Knute's Tune," a jazz composition by the late Guido Sinclair, a local legend on the jazz scene.
Another song, "We're all Gonna Die," received extensive airplay on the BBC and was voted No. 41 in last year's Festive 50 countdown. - The News Gazette