EUREKA CALIFORNIA

Published on January 3rd, 2017

EUREKA CALIFORNIA

An online search for Eureka California, the band, resists returning hits for this scrappy garage-pop duo from Athens, Georgia if you don’t include keywords such as “tour,” “music” or “band.” And even when you do, the internet sometimes still wants to steer you to a town on the northerly Pacific coast. It takes a bit of extra care to locate Eureka California. (Try Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records:)

The added hurdle makes sense: In a decade spanning four albums and an EP, band founder Jake Ward has operated, like most independent musicians, at a remove from the machinery of contemporary music-making. But there is also distance between Eureka California and some norms of the indie-rock subculture to which Ward and his lone bandmate of the last few years, drummer Marie A. Uhler, surely belong.

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One of their best-loved songs, This Ain’t No A-Side, from 2014, contains a critique of Athens, the near-sacred music capital where Ward originally relocated from North Carolina, and a base at one time or another for talents as varied as R.E.M. and Danger Mouse.

“You know that Athens is dead/And they’ll hang you for listening to Sabbath until dawn,” Ward sings, inhabiting the persona of a jaded know-it-all local. Here and elsewhere, Ward’s delivery recalls the boyish but observant air of frontmen such as Jonathan Richman and Stephen Malkmus.

Ward’s lyrics can be both coded and confessional, and his instinct is to confront his fears, uncertainties, frailties and disasters with a shot of irreverence that sometimes feels very Southern. As he sings on 2012’s Back to Washington, “I said I’m going home/And I ain’t going sober.”

Sonically, Ward and Uhler have a strong ransacking impulse, but on their newest album, 2016’s Versus, the short, concise tracks hold their catchy contours through the cheerful havoc wreaked by Ward’s overdriven guitar and Uhler’s cannonade of drumming. ~ Sean Piccoli