SEMO musicians team up to create heavy metal harmonies with Eurydice

By the time they're finished with their new song, "The Reaper's Monologue," pictures have been knocked flat on the mantle from the sound.

Eurydice's band practice is a lot of metal for the little basement in Jackson where they rehearse.

"Yeah, we've all got some nice tinnitus going," guitarist J.R. Davis jokes. But that comes with the territory when you're in a metal band.

"I don't know," Davis said. "I guess we're melodic thrash metal?"

"Meh -- maybe more baroque-influenced melodic death metal," bassist Ethan Trimble suggests.

Whatever it is, Eurydice's music is for the open of mind and stout of eardrum.

Just over a year old, Eurydice formed when rhythm guitarist and singer Josh Cooley put out a call for musicians who wanted to form a System of a Down cover band.

"So we got together, but then we realized we wanted to write," he explains between songs.

"We all looked around, like, 'Does anyone actually know any System of a Down stuff, or do you guys just want to jam?'" Davis adds.

And as luck would have it, almost all of the band's members also are studying music at Southeast Missouri State University. There's a vocal education major and a saxophone major. Trimble is majoring in French-horn performance and composition.

"Yep. All pretty metal," he said.

While French-horn scales might not fit the sound, all that musical literacy pays off when the band's trying to write a song in a jarring, off-kilter time signature or trying to incorporate four-part Gregorian chant harmonies in Latin.

It's loud and fast and complex. And it's pronounced yoo-RID-uh-see, by the way.

From the Greek mythology canon, in which Eurydice was the wife of Orpheus, the great musician. When she was killed, Orpheus played his way into the underworld and convinced Hades to let him bring her back, but at the last moment looked upon her, breaking the deal and dooming her back to the underworld.

Which sounds pretty metal, sure, but also just a bit nerdy. Luckily, Eurydice is blessed with a (too-juvenile-for-print) sense of humor and a gleeful, mischievous sense of irony.

The sort of irony that compels them to pepper their live sets with Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry covers. But even in the cheesiest, top-40-est of songs, they make room for sweep picking and growly vocals.

They're the first to admit their musical stylings aren't for everyone. Not everyone appreciates two lead guitarists layering harmonic minor riffs, but that's what Davis and Chris Boyd do best. Tapping techniques usually are reserved for Van Halen covers, but Trimble gets weird and wild with both hands on the fretboard. When they entered a battle of the bands at Pointfest in St. Louis, Davis said, crowds weren't exactly thrilled, but organizers later put it in perspective.

"They told us, 'You guys killed it, but you're a death-metal band and this is (105.7 FM) the Point,'" Davis said. It just wasn't the sort of conventional rock the radio station's listeners were accustomed to. "But overall, we've had a surprisingly great reception."

And despite their steady gigs in St. Louis and around Cape Girardeau, they're not the sort of band that's harboring hall-of-fame aspirations.

"This band is totally just for fun," he said. "Our goal is to be able to make cool music and meet some cool people."

By adopting that attitude, they have total creative license to be as metal -- or as meta-metal -- as they feel.

tgraef@semissourian.com

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