Eskimada
s/t

If you're a returning reader of my reviews you've probably seen that I often put a context around my reviews making a sort of "theme" where I bring forth a deeper philosophical and moral point. The point I want to illustrate today is the importance of the context in which you hear music and the affect this has for your perception and appreciation of what you hear.

Not many people realize how different music is perceived depending on where, when and how you hear it. You're affected by everything from your health, weariness, how alert you are, which people you have around you and if these makes you feel better or worse as well as if you're hungry or in pain or perhaps just sitting in the heat from sunshine and eating an ice cream. Yes, everything affect you and how much you feel for the music when you hear it. It's not just the quality on your music equipment but also what you've just hear before and in what environment you hear it. All of this contribute to why Hallowed never hurry our reviews but take our time listening in different situations and days and moods. Why do I go through all of this now? Well, Eskimada came to us in a package along with Essenza from Red Cat Promotion and for some reason my Windows Media Player shuffled the songs around and put them in their correct order but with every second song being Eskimada and every other Essenza. And in that order I played the album six or seven times before playing it in iTunes (where the program splitt the albums) and played the albums separately. When I played it in shuffled order I thought Eskimada was pretty good and completely kicked ass with Essenza, but when I played it without Essenza between the songs I couldn't feel any enthusiasm at all. What was the difference?

Eskimadas eponymously debut album comes straight out of Italy with a quite typical sound from modern American hard rock. Everything from the variation between clean vocals and more shouty, grunty and growly vocals exist in the music but is mostly clean and the voice is that kind of dirty, nasal voice that's common within skate-punk rock. The music is also quite varied with a quite simple sound yet going in to these strange melodies every now and then and I can't really figure out why they do that. The same goes for the string section. The guitars often play very simple lines and are mixed backwards in the sound hierarchy while the bass is all over the place and mixed up front. I feel that this album is a budgeted modern American hard rock bands like Fallout Boy, Bullet For My Valentine and Papa Roach as well as other youth related hard rock from USA. The sound quality just isn't as good and the music doesn't feel as well written but still the similarities are many and undeniable.

I think Eskimada does a lot of things right with this album and the album as a whole is not just something we can write off as a cheaper version of more successful American bands. Some of the material is actually better than their American paragonians. I especially this the wholeness in the complete product works better on 'Eskimada'. They tie together the full album well by not just making separate songs after each other but connect them with each other in parts of the the music as well as with separate songs that wouldn't do anything for you on their own but in the order they come with the rest they work. Like the two minute long Interludio that comes in the middle of the album. It's like a breath of air between the main material.

I can't tell you what I think is best with this album because I honestly don't know. But I do know there are things I don't like. For once there are those annoying bass lines that don't work with the other music at all and secondly we have those chopped up melodies everywhere and the thirdly there's the lack of any apparent competence anywhere on the album. The vocals are neither good or bad but definitely not good. I think the overall product is decent, no doubt about that but in the total playing time the album doesn't maintain my interest. It may very well be something we don't hear a lot - a mix between modern american hard rock and skate-punk - but it never lights a fire inside me. It's bends around in limbo, where no one else are and not really want to be either. However, if you like American hard rock but can't love it because it's just too over produced then I think you're exactly the person that will love this album. probably much more than I do. I think there are better bands in this genre and I therefore put my grade just below the middle.

And to return to my introducing bantering, why did I like this album better when I heard it with Essenza songs in between? Wouldn't two not great bands make it even more annoying? Well, in that context I thought the Eskimada songs saved the day because of the non-flattering sound of their label colleagues but that emotions didn't stay as I played them without outside interference. Plain Eskimada was not plain fun this time… but decent fun.