It’s time for another visit to those purveyors of aural oddities Bearsuit Records as they bring us the second album from Edinburgh-based noise merchant Eamon the Destroyer. Eamon certainly remains pretty much impossible to pigeon-hole into one genre. There’s electronica in there, psychedelia, indie-folk influences and all manner of strange little noises to keep a listener guessing.
It turns out that Eamon has been around under various guises for a while now. You can definitely hear his eclectic stylings in the two albums released under the moniker of Annie & The Station Orchestra. He also serves as one half of Edinburgh based act Ageing Children, who have three albums available on Spotify (other streaming services are available) for you to peruse and sound like some kind of demented lo-fi orchestral music box. He was even the guitarist in Idiot Half Brother.
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In 2021 he gave us A Small Blue Car and we rather liked it! So how does this sophomore effort – We’ll Be Piranhas – stack up? Well, the first track ‘The Choirmaster’ is certainly interesting, opening with the sort of sounds you’d get if you recorded a colliery brass band falling into the event horizon of a black hole. So, typical Eamon the Destroyer fare.
From there we move to track two, ‘Rope’, which sounds like it might have escaped from some alternate take from the soundtrack to The Prisoner, shifting into something more ethereal and almost science fiction-esque with the next track ‘Sonny Said’. Eamon has an interesting vocal style throughout this album, leaning more towards a spoken word style than really “singing”, but it works well when coupled with his rough, distorted music stylings.
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Track 4, ‘Underscoring the Blues’, starts off a little like Kate Bush wandered into the BBC Radiophonic Workshop before abruptly morphing into something almost Bjork-like, before finally morphing into some sort of house music tune. Of all the tracks on the album, this is the one that’ll keep you guessing about just what genre it wants to be.
Track 5 is the title track, a boozy little French-inspired number. Those who are a little squeamish around doctors and hospitals, consider yourselves warned as this track includes the rather provocative lyric “I’ll pull the cannula, you can stifle the screams” while the 6th track, ‘A Pewter Wolf’, brings back some of those Pink Floyd-ish/Vangelis-like influences from A Small Blue Car. ‘A Call Coming’, the seventh track on this 36 minute long album, is in some ways the most conventional track on the entire album, mostly sticking to one sound for its entire runtime of four minutes and 18 seconds.
‘My Stars’ wraps the album up, and it’s a slower, more thoughtful, almost ethereal offering than we’ve had till this point, emphasised still further by Eamon’s softer-spoken lyrics. For those of you listening on Spotify, that’s where the album ends! But if you manage to lay your hands on a physical copy, then there’s a cheeky hidden track tucked in there after nearly a full five minutes of silence where Eamon extolls the listener to “Dust yourself off and start all over again”.
As with a lot of Bearsuit’s offerings, We’ll Be Piranhas is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. The songs are a mishmash of instruments, genres, tempos and styles, but this second release under his new moniker shows he’s still an act worth keeping an eye on. If he ever tours, he’d definitely be one to check out. I can only imagine what some of these tracks would sound like played live.
We’ll Be Piranhas is out now from Bearsuit Records.
