Eyes Adrift - Eyes Adrift

  by Julia Willis

published: 21 / 4 / 2003

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Any outfit containing former members Nirvana and Sublime is going to generate speculative murmuring and anticipation, which is just as well really. Eyes Adrift on first listen is unremarkable with periodically appalling vocals, usually from Krist Novoselic, (Nirvana) ironically, the man responsible for ensuring the album will get a wider listen than perhaps it deserves. Its members distilled from seemingly unattributable past lives in Nirvana (Novoselic), Sublime (Bud Gaugh) and Meat Puppets, previously Nirvana support on the 'In Utero' tour in 1994 and honoured with three songs covered by the same on their unplugged album (Curt Kirkwood), Eyes Adrift defy expectations if nothing else. Whereas other ‘supergroups’ retain, enhance and merge influences, inheriting idiosyncratic genre-defining characteristics to form the bastard big brother of their previous incarnations, Eyes Adrift recoil, splinter and compress to conceive the mutant, unplanned baby, spawned by the improbable coupling of early nineties indie-grunge and folk/country rock. Hideous? Not quite. Mood is a fickle beast and so, fortunately is the record buying public. A reflective mood, bordering on the sombre transforms Eyes Adrift into an accidental slow burner rather than the dated amateurish post-grunge country rock it could be written-off as. The initial surprise of hearing a sound that implodes all expectations is admittedly hard to recover from and these preconceptions are a shameful but real hindrance to appreciating Eyes Adrift’s sound. It is for this reason the album is a grower; eyebrow-raising surprise eventually becomes an admiring nod to the hidden depths of yesteryear’s ear-splitting young things; those who created the sounds that shaped a generation which reveres Nirvana the way we worshipped Zeppelin. Reflective grunge-country won’t set your world alight but it might just keep the embers aglow in a vulnerable moment. Hell, someone has to.

Track Listing:-

1 Sleight of Hand
2 Alaska
3 Inquiring Minds
4 Untried
5 Blind Me
6 Dottie Dawn And Julie Jewl
7 Solid
8 Pyramids
9 Telescope
10 Slow Race
11 What I Said
12 Pasted
13 Alaska

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