Eureka machines

Victories

Fifth album from Leeds quartet crackles and pops.

Ten years and five albums later, Chris Catalyst and the Eureka Machines sound as gung-ho and resilient as a box-fresh band just discovering they’ve bagged an American tour with Def Leppard. In a perfect world, that’s what should have happened to the Eureka Machines; even the Americans would have fallen for their pop-punk charms, even if they might have missed the band’s darker underbelly.

Like all the best and enduring pop bands, Eureka Machines combine the pop notes of bands like Cheap Trick, Wildhearts and Honeycrack with the ruddy introspection of a band who’ve spent too much time in the service stations alongside the M1 motorway. They’ve come brilliantly good here, though, with the ringing Dancing In The Dark, the aching House Of Butterflies or the spangled experimentation of the expansive, splashing My Rock And Roll Is Dead.