If you’ve fallen out with pop, if horrors committed in its name have left you disillusioned, buy this. Having endorsed the band-to-fan trade with a successful PledgeMusic campaign, Remain In Hope is poised to take back pop in style.
Mixing Green Day drive with Buzzcocks-esque sensibilities (not to mention frontman Chris Catalyst’s post-punk experience with The Sisters Of Mercy), Eureka Machines have further honed their colourful, ballsy pop-rock cocktail. Good Guys Finish Last will have the manliest rockers in eye-fluttering heaps, while meatier riffs in the likes of Living In Squalor seal punk-tinged rock credentials. And Pop Star, uptempo but laced with minor melody shifts and biting sentiments, is stupidly good. We’d marry it if we could.
Wide-eyed joie de vivre meets spiky knowingness in lyrics that home in on strangely perceptive details – ‘You told me all of your pets’ names,’ Catalyst muses in Wish You Were Her. ‘In the age of the genius, this is the dawn of the idiot,’ the smilingly melancholy Break Stuff laments.
OK, they’re hardly Archimedes ‘Eureka!’ revelations, but in a way it’s these familiar notions expressed poetically that resonate most powerfully. Testament to the rousing power of beautifully crafted pop rock.
