Carta d'Eritrea - Quattroquarti

The wonderfull world of music never ceases to suprise me! Take this EP (8 tracks with about 25 minutes playingtime, thats not an album laddies!) for instance. The bandname is cool for an Italian band, i give them that. Italy used to do pretty bad things to Ethiopia (of which Eritrea used to be part), so the name is... a bit weird. But with an almost full set of Von Thronstahl releases in my music collection, i tend to be forgiving about these kind of details.

This does not go for bad music however. Carta d'Eritrea is pretty bad. It gets more weird if you find out it took them four years to record this short half an hour of very mediocre electropunk with some darkwave influences. I found an interview with them in which they stated it took them so long, because they were doing it themselves, and wanted to create the sound they wanted for their music. Well, their sound is most certainly not the sound i would want for my bands. The vocalist sounds like she has been recorded on the toilet, and that goes for guitars and bass as well.Very little soundprocessing makes for a dull sound, and if you add bad mixing to it, you aren't exactly doing it right. Maybe this is the sound they want, but it is most certainly not the sound the listener would want.

The music is not exactly great as well. All songs lack good hooks and sound more like if they just threw some ideas together without caring too much if they would fit together. Some songs are just plain bad songwriting (Pink Mourn and Euganea trip) and most of the time you wonder what these girl and guys are actually trying to do here. It does not make any sense at all.

Biggest problem of this band to me is the lack of a good songwriter. And they should get someone to produce the material properly. The musicians seem reasonable on their instruments, and the singer isn't bad, but some dudes who are reasonable on their instruments and a girl who can sing doesn't make for a good band. You need to have good ideas which work, and this band does it all wrong. Like we say in the Netherlands: "They have heard the bell ring, but they don't know where the clapper hangs". Back to the drawing board! Sep 06 2012