EUPHONIC...

You might have heard Euphonic before. While the Radioheads and Nine Inch Nails of the world were pondering the new music model, last year EUPHONIC were releasing their singles as free downloads clearing nearly 10,000 iTunes downloads of last year’s universally-acclaimed "YEAHNO".

While other bands were jamming in their rehearsal rooms, you might have seen Euphonic when they were doing regular laps of the nation’s venues in support of their three singles during 2007. Perhaps you’d seen them in earlier incarnations, releasing critically-acclaimed EPs and lapping Australia tour after tour [2004]. It’s worth knowing these things, because otherwise you could be forgiven for thinking the band had appeared, fully formed, out of nowhere.

Nothing could be further from the truth: so obsessed with music were founding brothers Paul and Bret Carpenter that their jazz-musician father allowed them to leave school at the minimum legal age on the condition that they dedicated themselves to the band full-time. "This band's gone through some ups and downs, big time," confides frontman Paul. "It took a while to get the right people to do the job that you want done. You have to have musicians with the right mindset, to write music beneath your lyrics and build an emotion there."

DROWNING FOR DAYLIGHT is a solid, snarling and passionate local album. While the rest of Australia’s Next Big Things were sorting out the paperwork on their jeans-brand cross-promotions, Euphonic's band members; brothers Paul (vox, guitars) and Bret Carpenter (drums), Tara Doyle (bass) and Nik Philpott (guitars) were toiling in Melbourne's Birdland Studios under the watchful eye of Dean Turner – aka Dean Dirt, bass wrangler with Magic Dirt. Carpenter declares that Turner understood the measure of high charges: “He said we’re a rock’n’roll band, and so he was gonna produce us like a rock’n’roll band.”

This is a band so confident in its abilities that it can clear nearly 10,000 downloads of "YEAHNO" and not even find room for it on their debut album - unlike "Tipping Point"; re-recorded from its single incarnation, so it pulses with a new, dark energy. From the take-no-prisoners opener "Headspace" to the redemptive closer "Warning Bell", DROWNING FOR DAYLIGHT is the work of a band heading for the height of its game. If this debut offering is any indication of the future of Australian rock, then we are in for a golden age.

Don't bother pinning genres to Euphonic: they don't want to, and neither do you. What you want to know is this: if this is the future of Australian rock, we're in for a golden age.

ANDREW P STREET

© RiSH Publicity 2008 : RiSH Records