Eureka

AMG Review of Eureka

William Ruhlmann
All Music Guide

The producers of Eureka, the Sci-Fi Channel series about a top-secret town full of geniuses in the Pacific Northwest, decided to switch composers for the second season and turned to Bear McCreary, best known for his work on another Sci-Fi Channel show, Battlestar Galactica. As heard on this 77-minute disc of excerpts from the season's episodes, McCreary naturally has taken a very different approach to the music than he does with the other series. His basic conception seems to have been to evoke the rural, Western, small-town setting of the show by using country-rock and Americana styles played on acoustic guitars, his own accordion, and even an Australian didgeridoo, while getting across the science fiction aspects by oddly mixing in sometimes cheesy synthesizer parts that sound like they've been borrowed from some outdated video game. In so doing, he expresses musically what the program's executive producer, Charlie Craig, calls in his liner notes "the mixture of mystery and whimsy that is our show." Covering varying episodes from an entire season, the soundtrack album also brings in some tracks that diverge from McCreary's approach, including the brief main title theme, "Eureka on My Mind," written by John Enroth and former Devo leader Mark Mothersbaugh; the blue-eyed soul song "Let's Get Hitched," written and performed by Brendan McCreary (presumably some relation to the composer); and Captain Ahab's "EurekAerobics," a synth-rock dance theme. But much of this music sounds like what might be heard in some Western bar if a band was playing while kids banged away at video games in the back.