If you happened to be reading a music magazine late in 1991, chances are you would have encountered an interview with either a post-Nevermind Nirvana or a post-Bandwagonesque Teenage Fanclub. (Possibly both.) And chances would also have been good that in the interview, they would have heaped praise upon a Scottish band going by the name of Captain America. Yes, like the superhero. Enough like the superhero, in fact, that legal action was threatened, and so it was that the new band of Eugene Kelly, late of The Vaselines, would be renamed Eugenius.
With a reunited Vaselines currently touring and the collection Enter the Vaselines newly released by Sub Pop, Eugenius might be overlooked in the larger context of Kelly’s songwriting. But the ways in which Kelly (credited with writing 11 of the 14 songs on Oomalama) brings blissed-out pop of an entirely different sort to fruition here is both rewarding and insidiously catchy.
As the live recordings on Enter the Vaselines make clear, Kelly’s previous band combined sunshine imagery with a gleefully smutty lyrical sensibility -- just cue up “Rory Rides Me Raw” for the apex of this juxtaposition. Oomalama pivots on the same contrast, bringing the childlike wonder of pop music together with a reluctant weariness. It’s the sound of someone leaving a busied youth behind and learning to understand downtime, writing reflective pop songs about, essentially, being reflective. At the same time, there’s also the matter of the front and back covers (which feature lovingly arranged dioramas of children’s toys) and the tips-of-the-hat to superhero comic books, both in the group’s original name and in the fact that one song bears the title “Flame On.”
Oomalama opens with the title track’s unfettered bliss, led in by a stomping drumbeat and fuzzed-out guitars. One could argue that the album is bookended by tributes to a pair of early Stateside Vaselines supporters, with its opener evoking a cuddlier version of Mudhoney. The word “oomalala” is repeated over and over next to barely decipherable lyrics about boys and girls, summoning the kind of euphoria the faux-meditative title can only allude. The segue from its manic rush to the defined notes that open “Breakfast” is dramatic: a blurred night out tumbling into a morning miraculously free from hangover, but contemplative nonetheless. “Cool September morn/ I was reborn/ The sun gate crashed through my front door,” Kelly sings, and for the first two stanzas he details absence, until the chorus, regretful without apologies: “Sometimes I can’t help falling down,” repeated four times, each version meaning something different.
"Oomalama" and "Breakfast" set the tone for the rest of the album: exuberant melodies coexisting with lyrics bewildered by their own disillusionment. “Jesus, take my life from me,” Kelly sings on “Down on Me,” and the sentiment remains even amidst the roar of drums and the chorus of tuned-in harmonies. What separates the album as a whole from more boilerplate power-pop is a tendency to zig-zag, both in its flow from song to song and in the sidearm progressions within the songs themselves. Kelly’s voice is more charming than strong, but it nonetheless anchors a series of inherently comfortable harmonies. And the track order seems designed less to evoke a consistent rise and fall and more to summon up a jumble of emotions, from elation to depression to resignation.
Oomalama closes with a violin-driven cover of Beat Happening’s “Indian Summer.” “Just a boy playing possum,” Kelly sings, his tone implying that it’s been years since he was that boy. And again, the lyrics return to one line: “We go our separate ways.” Although the song isn’t Eugenius’s own, they settle into its rolling beat evenly, channeling its bittersweet nostalgia and, perhaps, using it to demarcate their own beginnings.
1. Oomalama
2. Breakfast
3. One's Too Many
4. Bed-In
5. Hot Dog
6. Down on Me
7. Flame On
8. Here I Go
9. I'm the Sun
10. Buttermilk
11. Bye Bye
12. Wow!
13. Wannabee
14. Indian Summer