“To Be Continued” is one of those records that forces you into an instant recap of the career of its author, ER Jurken, whose 2021 debut has escaped even the most diligent listeners and critics in search of new creative shores (including myself).
Born in Milwaukee, welcomed into the Chicago music circuit, ER Jurken plays with the Junegrass trio, author of an excellent album in 2025 that was also largely ignored. ER Jurken is the prototype of the anti-star par excellence, an Andy Partridge with a slightly less mocking look, who enjoys subverting the rules of the most cultured pop with a series of apparent flights of fancy that conceal a profound knowledge of those mechanisms and that genius that has always ennobled American music, à la Van Dyke Parks.
“To Be Continued” is a record whose title already betrays a preparatory ambition for future excursions that are even more sagacious and full of surprises. “In Monterey” is a song that not only serves to open the album, but also to keep away lovers of sophisticated pop and the most affected chamber-folk. ER Jurken proves himself to be a fine speaker of those compositional strategies that have references in Elton John who is more akin to rock'n'roll – an example of this is midtempo of the just mentioned “In Monterey” – or in the country-western extravagances (the unruly “Main Man”), entering the realm of psychedelia with equal candor and imagination (the garage-rock-psych of the splendid “Mighty And Concelead”).
“To Be Continued” is a 360-degree excursion that includes melodic and romantic outbursts of rare grace (the reflective piano-ballad “Lady Of Renown”), sweet unions with a string section (“So, Surprise”), acrobatic power-pop disguised as glam and folk (“Uncle Denny” and “I Do”), chamber folk that seem to come out of a Left Banke album (“Morning Paper”) and complex bigamists of that American music that includes Bob Dylan and Neil Young (“A Good Place To Fall”) but also Wilco in “All The Way To Georgia”.
ER Jurken perhaps does not have the physique du role to capture the public's attention, but if you prefer intelligence, irony and even a pinch of disenchantment to the protagonism and self-indulgence of many contemporary authors, you have found the right album to reconcile with the word pop.
02/16/2026
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
