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Eulogies

Eulogies

(Dangerbird; US: 11 Sep 2007; UK: Available as import)

It’s nice when something like this happens: on tour as a solo artist last year, Peter Walker and his backing band formed the kind of bond that had them reincarnated as a true band. On their self-titled debut, Eulogies expands its simple guitar/bass/drums arrangements with soft, ghostly effects. Kind of like “Exit Music (For A Film)”-era Radiohead. Mostly it’s not that obvious. If you’re familiar with Walker’s work, Eulogies isn’t too much of a departure—his confluent rock sound’s fairly MOR, but at least genuine. “Little Davie” is indicative of what’s best about Eulogies, easily influenced by classic rock idols but finding its own voice, a slow/sad meditation on the cut-throat nature of work tied up in profits and performance reviews. But over the course of the record, a compositional technique of beginning relatively mellow, swelling over the course of a song to a fuller, wall-of-sound climax is repeated enough times that it loses something of its power. Nevertheless, Eulogies is less often tedious than pleasant, Walker’s voice hovering between angst and something pop-smooth. It washes by with its easy and echoing guitars, and like that, is gone.

Rating:

Dan Raper has been writing about music for PopMatters since 2005. Prior to that he did the same thing for his college newspaper and for his school newspaper before that. Of course he also writes fiction, though his only published work is entitled "Gamma-secretase exists on the plasma membrane as an intact complex that accepts substrates and effects intramembrane cleavage". He is currently studying medicine at the University of Sydney, Australia.


Tagged as: eulogies
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Eulogies can mix styles as smooth as a food processor, but lack the melodies to spice things up.
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