The former SEA + AIR singer has been working on his debut solo album for four years. Despite the existential fears, Daniel Benyamin found inspiration when the crisis came to a standstill - so he managed to dedicate himself to his own reinvention and the completion of ‘Eral Fun’, detached from any external pressure.
The result was the first album in a pentalogy about opposing human states that attract each other. In eleven images, lightness and melancholy deliver a skirmish, in whose zeal the dissonance between fun and loss, joy and death is treated and presented with newly found emotional force and depth, the listeners lose themselves and at the same time win the battle.
The multi-instrumental joy of playing and the epochal songwriting with which he released indie hits like ‘Do Animals Cry?’ or ‘The Heart Of The Rainbow’, Daniel Benyamin consistently develops it further here, sophisticated and catchy at the same time. With old school keyboard sounds, atmospheric guitars, futuristic drumming and the clarity and complexity of his singing, he opens a new chapter - after Ghost Pop it was time to come up with his own genre again: inspired by the naive artists at the beginning of the last century he is calling it Naïve Music.
In terms of content, ‘Eral Fun’ is a collection of short stories about taboos surrounding death. These have belonged to Daniel Benyamin since the first song he wrote in naïve school English at the age of 11 and so it was time to devote an entire album to the subject. There’s room for different angles, different kinds of death: A mother leaving. The end of a relationship. Laughing at the abyss. Wish someone dead. Grief. A criminal case in the family. Places that collapse. Be glad you survived. Space for things that nobody likes to talk about and a perspective: having fun with transience, that death always brings change and an end always brings a new beginning.
“‘Eral Fun’ marks a crazy time in my life,” he says. “The songs process the extreme experiences of the last few years, mixed with my curiosity about taboos and the fun of finding out where the stench is coming from. Is it any wonder that this happiest album I've made so far?”
In times of change, there will be a need for works of art like this one that draw inspiration from necessity. return to progress. Not a circle that closes, but an upward spiral that spirals into the next round. And yes, the title is a play on words. Too easy to just figure it out.
Source: Press Release
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