The music is often gentle on this debut release from Eyes Adrift (featuring the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood on guitar, Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic on bass, and Sublime/Long Beach Dub Allstars’ Bud Gough on drums), but there’s also a decided undercurrent of, well, paranoia. After all, the opening track, “Sleight Of Hand”, refers to a con game, and the first line, “All of my friends are not the ones I got,” conveys a clear sense of unease. “Inquiring Minds” begins with a soothing guitar riff but soon explodes into a rush of sound, the lyrics using JonBenet Ramsay’s death as the jumping-off point for a withering indictment of the media. And “What I Said” seems nothing more than a dreamy ode to miscommunication.
But “dreamy” could also describe much of this album’s overall tone. Kirkwood’s often warm guitar can turn into trippy jamming at a moment’s notice, nowhere better seen than on “Pasted”, a rambling parable with Novoselic on crisp, clear lead vocals and cynical sentiments — “Those who do believe/They know they are deceived” — which eventually spirals off into the stratosphere for an intoxicating 15 minutes.
There’s even a love song or two — Novoselic’s jovial valentine to his dogs (“Dottie Dawn & Julie Jewel”) and Kirkwood’s “Blind Me”, presumably directed toward a human. Forget your preconceptions of the musicians’ previous work; Eyes Adrift is in a confident class of its own.