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Reviews

Eunuchs — Harbour Century
(Bandcamp no#, 2024, 2LP / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2024-05-31

Harbour Century Cover art

It is one of the mantras of my life that musical genres are artificial constructs that exist primarily for the purpose of marketing and have little to do with quality or artistic value. Over the years, I’ve heard and reviewed a number of bands that embody this concept in their music, including Alex’s Hand, Spine Readers, Lovely Little Girls, Estradasphere, and Mr Bungle, which might be considered the modern template of (more-or-less) rock music where pretty much anything goes. Australia’s Eunuchs is another example, new to me with their second album, Harbour Century. I’m a little unclear who is actually in the band and who is a guest in the credits; the group photos show four people, whom I assume to be Linus Hilton (lead vocals, keyboards), Enzo Legge (guitar, bass, banjo, accordion, keyboards), Kristo Langkjær (drums, percussion), and Finn Fowke (bass, woodwinds). Engineer Nick Hatzakos also plays some instruments, as do about a dozen others, contributing strings, woodwinds, brass, and so on. The lyrics are formed around the loose concept of characters in and around Sydney Harbour who appear at various spots along the spectrum from reality to fiction. In this spirit:

Lead singer Linus Hilton recounts: "I went to a fortune teller who urged me to release 55 minutes and 55 seconds of impressive music within the next year for great luck over the next 55 years." Motivated by this revelation, the band embarked on 55 days of intense music writing, capturing the essence of Sydney.

The music is wildly creative, incorporating everything from heavy rock to cabaret jazz to modern classical music to pure insanity. Hilton’s lead vocals range from dramatic countertenor melodies to spoken word to manic screaming. When they rock, they’re tight as all get-out, and the expanded instrumentation is handled superbly, inspired more by modern composers than Romantic or earlier, full of harmonic density and complex interactions. You will be hard pressed to find a more unfettered blast of creativity than this amazing album. In the spirit of ridiculously expanded metaphors, imagine a piece of visual art, a large canvas where one section depicts a hyper-realistic scene in oils, another section is delicately tinted watercolor, and next to that is a brash, heavily textured area of thick acrylics, then a bit of collage featuring pictures cut from old magazines and 19th Century natural history texts, and in the center is a grotesque sculpture emerging with displaced human body parts… Or you could just go to Bandcamp and have a listen.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Eunuchs

More info
http://eunuchs.bandcamp.com/album/harbour-century

 

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