Description
"He's alive!!! And can he sing! Could this be the world's first experimental MOR album? Nah, but time will tell whether or not it is the most supreme. Wackos of the world, take over."
Jim O'Rourke, a Chicago native, spent the decade leading up to Eureka tied into the city's vibrant experimental music scene, an interconnected web of artists spinning wildly exploratory sounds in the realms of rock, post-rock, jazz, folk, and more. Beyond his own bands such as Gastr Del Sol and Brise-Glase, he has credits on a mind-boggling number of classic albums by both indie household names and genuine obscurities.
Many of those people contributed to Eureka. Glenn Kotche appears several times to reorder time and space with his drumming the way he would on so many of Jeff Tweedy's songs upon joining Wilco a few years later. The instrumental "Through The Night Softly" features Drag City co-founder Rian Murphy on drums alongside sax work by Ken Vandermark, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his endlessly curious jazz dalliances the same year Eureka came out. Several members of his Vandermark 5 can also be heard as well, including cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and trombonist Jeb Bishop, who also played with Vandermark in the early days of free-jazz noise freaks the Flying Luttenbachers. Bishop's trombone often combines with cornet by Chicago Underground Collective's Rob Mazurek and trumpet by Shellac's Bob Weston. O'Rourke's Brise-Glase bandmate Darin Gray plays bass on three tracks. Psychedelic country singer Edith Frost throws knowingly hokey retro backing vocals on a cover of Burt Bacharach's "Something Big."
You read that right: Eureka features a Bacharach cover, one that lays on the cheese so thick you can practically see the jazz hands. And that's not the only moment on the album that could be described as pop. O'Rourke had assembled this battalion of avant-garde geniuses in service of his most accessible album to date. Eureka is playfully dubbed an "experimental MOR album." But its spectacular shapeshifting sprawl is only MOR by O'Rourke's esoteric standards.
Originally released February 25, 1999
![Jim O'Rourke - Eureka [Full Album]](media/video-thumbnail/265174-hqdefault.jpg)
