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To Hal and Bacharach

In 2010, Jim O'Rourke assembled All Kinds of People: Love Burt Bacharach, a tribute record on which he produced all the music, and invited along a Japanese-centric list of guest vocalists including Kahimi Karie, Yoshimi P-We of Boredoms, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. It was the culmination of a long-held love of Bacharach that O'Rourke first unleashed in 1999, with a giddy, joyous cover of "Something Big," a bright, sunny highlight on the impressive Eureka.

When Eureka arrived, though, this "Something Big" cover was transgressive, a bold, provocative statement of O'Rourke's emergent 'pop' identity and a rejection of the austerity, aggression, and sarcasm that cloaked so much '90s music.

A Polished Diamond Jim

O'Rourke had come up in Chicago's underground as a staunch avant-gardist, exploring microtones, minimalist composition, free-jazz, and freeform sounds of most 'difficult' stripe. He first hewed towards songform with Gastr del Sol, his long-running collaboration with David Grubbs. With 1997's solo album Bad Timing, O'Rourke made the first of his 'pop' records, with repetitious bluegrass guitar patterns and smart studio sonics building up in grand post-rock formations.

But Eureka took things far further. The set was filled with bright, bold, 'classic pop-song' arrangements in the style of Bacharach, with pianos, strings, horns, and, in "Through the Night Softly" —well over a decade before indie-rock's Year of the Saxophone— even a blasting, blistering sax solo.

For those who'd kept a close ear to O'Rourke's collaborations and studio productions —including contemporaneous work with Stereolab and the Aluminum Group— it felt in keeping with this current state; but, for those who'd followed Diamond Jim's early avant-gardist works or simply chanced upon Eureka in 1999, there was a provocation in its soft-pop embrace.

Words and Music

Eureka was the first O'Rourke album that featured vocals. For "Something Big," O'Rourke employed Edith Frost and Teria Garteris to belt out Bacharach's brassy choruses, but, elsewhere, he handled the singing himself; debuting his soft, sweet, sarcastic singing voice. His vocals sat very much within the mix —more quizzical than forceful— and, both sonically and lyrically, suggested the playful qualities of the greater whole.

For all its Bacharach homage —both explicit and implied— the album is no work of revivalism or recreation. Instead, O'Rourke synthesizes different elements —bright pop arrangements, bluegrass figures, squealing electronics, ultra-droll lyrics— into singular-sounding songs. The album is at once accessible and elusive, the normal hard edges of genre, structure, and sentimentality blurred into something stranger, more complex, and unique.

The lyrics land somewhere between ironic and plain comic, with a sense of gallows humor at play. "You're thinking on your feet/while you're sitting there on your ass," O'Rourke sweetly intones amidst the synth frequencies of the beautiful, strange title-track, but it's less gag than quiet mutterance. "Women of the World," the nine-minute anthem that opens the album, finds a chorus caroling "Women of the world take over/because if you don't the world will come to an end/and it won't take long," a sweet tribute to the sisterhood that, even still, carries with it a note of apocalyptic fatalism.

"Ghost Ship in a Storm" plays that tragicomic notion to an absurdist end; O'Rourke imagining his demise coming in hilariously-absurd fashion. "It's just my luck/I get hit by a car/while carrying a cake," O'Rourke whispers, whilst piano mirrors his voice and sinuous pedal steel is drizzled on like honey, "dripping cherries/onto pavement/bride and groom on my face."

Pop, Uncertain

The lyrics aren't, however, the standout thing on the album. Nor do they, really, even stand out. But that's the point: they are another element of the sound, but one that, on further observation, reveals something deeper, another layer, and something unexpected. Across its eight songs, Eureka plays as a sustained suite; a singular piece in which tracks flow from one to the next, motifs arise, are discarded, and then return, and melodies and discordance both rise and lull, coming forward and pulling back in productions of constant motion.

In turn, the LP will hit different ears in different ways: to some it will sound cold and distant, others warm and intimate; for some it will be sweetly melodic, others experimental; some unbroken, others inconsistent. In a similar —though far more rewarding— sense, Eureka can sound different to the very same set of ears; on each successive spin, on each successive song, or even from moment to moment.

In O'Rourke's career canon —which would, in subsequent years, include stints as Wilco's 'fifth Beatle' and as fully-fledged Sonic Youth member— it's undoubtedly a pop record. But it's pop music in uncertain terms, with even those who've spent concerted time studying Eureka eternally unsure of its author's intentions.

Record Label: Drag City
Release Date: February 25, 1999